From the Ground Up

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You can't rush cob. You must build slowly or your walls will not have the proper time to harden and hold themselves up as you build. Many folks love the slow process and love working in the clay and sand with their hands and feet. Becky Bee, our workshop leader, likes to compare it to making a sculpture big enough to live in. This kind of slow-going handmade method can't help but impart the building with a lot more character and warmth than any fast form-laying machine-operated building technique can ever hope to. It gives you time to be in your house before you live there, and this will inevitably cause you to redesign it to fit your life as you go. You might find, for example, that you could put an alcove in that wasted space, or that there is just enough room in the bay window (cob is perfect for bay windows) to put in a window bench. If you plan to live in the place the rest of your life, attention to such details means a great deal.

I suppose not everybody likes the accessibility of this type of building. Thus, nervous building code inspectors, contractors, and people who have no faith in the perseverance of individuals will most likely ridicule your cob home. "How can you build a house, handful by handful, of nothing but dirt and straw? Won't it turn to mud and wash away as soon as it rains?" You can tell them that cob probably originated in an area of the world renowned for the dampness of its climate—England—where some cob buildings built in the 16th and 17th centuries are still standing. Some 50,000 cob buildings constructed in the 18th and 19th centuries are still in full use in England today.

Cob is safe, and is increasingly recognized as such by building codes. Arizona is the only state with building codes that specifically allow for cob construction, but many post-and-beam buildings with cob infill have been approved in other states. Recently, Vancouver issued a permit for a completely load-bearing cob house. Natural builders see this as a precedent for permits elsewhere.

With walls like rock that endure centuries, cool in summer, warm in winter, cob provides a comfortable, accessible home for those of modest means. According to Becky, "if you are good at scrounging, your cob house will cost between $7 to $15 a square foot, not counting labor, but counting gas for transporting materials." With a few whitewashed walls or natural pigment plasters that even Martha Stewart would love, cob has often appealed to those of a more bourgeois tendency as well. Perhaps its greatest appeal to all is that the design of a cob house can be unique, encouraging curvy walls (which are inherently more stable than their straight counterparts), alcoves, cob sculptures, and mosaics of glass, tiles, seashells, and so on.

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