Southern Comfort in a Straw Bale Home
This rural Georgia home balances grace and style with sustainable design.
June/July 2004
By Claire Anderson
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Photos by Shawn Schreiner
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This rural Georgia home balances grace and style with sustainable design.
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by Claire Anderson
Near the end of a dirt road that weaves in and out of the woods outside Farmington, Ga., sits a tasteful Southern farmhouse owned by Elise Lang and Michael Pierce. Its wide hip roof and the deep eaves that cover the wraparound porch echo the era of mint juleps, seersucker suits and the sweet twang of banjos.
But look a little closer and you'll find a house that puts a new twist on tradition — the "truth window," a small 6-by-6-inch hole on the north wall of the foyer, says it all: This house is built with straw bales.
Standing in the home's entryway, with its tall ceilings rising to a 20-foot peak and dramatic arched passageways to the home's interior, you can easily overlook the truth window. At first, the unplastered patch seems like an imperfection in this nearly new home, but it reveals what makes Elise and Michael's house so distinctive: This house is a straw bale structure — the first permitted in Oconee County, Ga., according to officials there, and according to the couple, perhaps the first in the state.
Dixie Meets Determination
Elise, a former U.S. Army captain, stumbled across straw bale building while stationed at Fort Huachuca, Ariz. "I was looking for a place to live, and some people told me about Mary Diamond, who was looking for someone to take care of her straw bale home," Elise says.
Although she couldn't leave her post to be a caretaker, Elise took the opportunity to tour Mary's house. The home's amazing insulative qualities appealed to her environmental sensibilities, but Elise distinctly recalls that it was the feeling of the house — the sense that you were embraced, snug and cozy inside the structure — that captured her heart.
"It was the sense of being connected to nature, and the feeling of peace and harmony that inspired me," Elise says. "It's the same feeling I get when I'm in the woods or the mountains; the Earth connection, except it was inside this amazing home."
Homecoming
Fourteen years ago, at the urging of friends, Elise purchased 50 wooded acres with a 650-square-foot passive-solar cabin outside of Athens, home of her alma mater, the University of Georgia. She visited the property when she could but decided that because she was stationed across the country, she needed a caretaker.
Enter Michael Pierce: artist, world traveler and self-proclaimed Supreme Bean (he started what may have been the first tofu processing plant in Germany in the 1980s). In 1991, after returning to his native Georgia from travels in Europe and India, Michael took the caretaking job, living in the little cabin and maintaining the land for Elise. He finally met his landlord three years later, and sparks flew. They maintained a long-distance relationship for several months, until he joined her in Arizona. But Dixie kept calling the native Southerners home — Elise originally hails from New Orleans; Michael's family lives in Macon, Ga. The next year, Elise resigned her Army commission, and the couple settled into the cabin on the Georgia property.
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