{"id":786064,"date":"2026-05-10T07:36:20","date_gmt":"2026-05-10T07:36:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/786064\/"},"modified":"2026-05-10T07:36:20","modified_gmt":"2026-05-10T07:36:20","slug":"beware-of-wolves-but-straw-houses-could-help-with-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/786064\/","title":{"rendered":"Beware of Wolves, but Straw Houses Could Help With Climate Change"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"css-ac37hb evys1bk0\">The straw house is 28 feet tall and has a sleeping loft, a daybed, five windows and a kitchen. It will be used as a guesthouse by five families, including Mr. Lewis\u2019s, that jointly own the land.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-ac37hb evys1bk0\">A heat pump, powered by a battery system on the premises and solar panels atop a trailer next door, provides heating and cooling. It is the culmination of three years of research, manual labor, and trial and error. The materials cost a little more than $50,000 (a hefty portion of that \u2014 $18,000 \u2014 went toward the house\u2019s thatch roofing).<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-ac37hb evys1bk0\">Straw has been used as insulation for years, but usually within a wooden frame, with the straw bales hidden, as part of a hippie-chic style known as <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/07\/14\/garden\/in-the-catskills-building-stone-by-stone-bale-by-bale.html\" title=\"\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">the straw-bale house<\/a>. In Nebraska, prairie settlers used straw bales as load-bearing building blocks and then coated them with mud or plaster. But the straw house near Hudson features compressed straw \u2014 where the loose and airy stalks are packed tightly together using heat \u2014 as both insulation and building block, without hiding the material behind plaster or wood.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-ac37hb evys1bk0\">Inside the home, in other words, the straw remains visible, like exposed brick, illustrating how Mr. Lewis\u2019s team built the structure by stacking its components together. On the exterior, the house looks like the perfect domicile for a fairy-tale witch, or three bears. But inside, its clean lines and layers of cut-up straw panels, many of them stacked on an angle, evoke modern minimalism, with custom lighting and large windows with views of the land.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-ac37hb evys1bk0\">Chris Magwood, a manager of carbon-free buildings for RMI, a sustainability nonprofit, had heard of the project. \u201cIt was a cool thing to try,\u201d he said. But he noted that adding a simple wooden frame or using entire sheets of strawboard instead of cutting it into pieces would have made the whole exercise much easier and still would have minimized the use of wood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The straw house is 28 feet tall and has a sleeping loft, a daybed, five windows and a&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":786065,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,2513,257859,321355,83329,16478,24421,23590,321358,405,403,5226,5225,321357,5228,5227,15752,11228,160260,155549,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,321356],"class_list":{"0":"post-786064","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-architecture","10":"tag-building-construction","11":"tag-carbon-capture-and-sequestration","12":"tag-carbon-dioxide","13":"tag-global-warming","14":"tag-greenhouse-gas-emissions","15":"tag-guy","16":"tag-hudson-ny","17":"tag-new-york","18":"tag-new-york-city","19":"tag-newyork","20":"tag-newyorkcity","21":"tag-nordenson","22":"tag-ny","23":"tag-nyc","24":"tag-princeton-university","25":"tag-real-estate-and-housing-residential","26":"tag-straw","27":"tag-sustainable-living","28":"tag-united-states","29":"tag-united-states-of-america","30":"tag-unitedstates","31":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","32":"tag-us","33":"tag-usa","34":"tag-wood-and-wood-products"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116549136408351838","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=786064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786064\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/786065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=786064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=786064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=786064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}