Blog 33: Sustainable Building

Marie at Studio 26 Architects

We first met our new friend Marie Fleming from Studio 26 Architects at an earth plastering workshop in 2018, and she joined us for our strawbale wall raising day earlier this year.

Marie is very active promoting sustainable construction through local groups like the Hawkes Bay Sustainable Building Group and Green Drinks.  These groups increase awareness of sustainable techniques and approaches, promote local people who are providing sustainable building solutions and encourage the many people who would like to live more sustainably to take the leap and act on their good intentions.

She approached us recently about hosting a combined site visit to Nga Kereru for these two interest groups and we, along with Pat and Nils from RM Strawbale, were very happy to say yes… 

We had around 30 people show up on a Thursday night, parking roadside and walking up the drive at dusk (about 5:30pm as we headed into winter) and back down again in the country dark - that’s dark!  Everyone chipped in $5 and we put on some nibbles and drinks along with a talk on our building experience to-date - the cheese board, olives and assorted nuts went down really well.

Barley Straw - a local building material thats a byproduct of an annual crop

The talk focussed on sustainable aspects of the ‘immediate’ construction process e.g. no landfill skip with recycling on site, re-use of materials ex demolition, local materials substitution and the sourcing of no or low toxicity materials.. and on the ‘on-going’ sustainable design aspects e.g. passive solar, passiv haus, strawbale, earth plasters, vermiculture (worms) waste management, spring and rainwater use and native forest regeneration.

Alessandra working with clay/straw cob

Pat and I ad-libbed the talk, we had a group Q&A and then it was time to eat, socialise and take the one on one questions.., in the end we were so busy talking to the group that we ended up with no photo’s :-). 

It was a great night, a lot of fun and we met many lovely people. We hope they will join us for another site visit later this year when we have completed the initial build.