Look what’s in straw

What A pair of three-bedroom, semi-detached straw bale homes for affordable rent, with two more in the pipeline

Where Waddington and Martin, Lincolnshire

Who North Kesteven Council, Taylor Pearson and Amazonails

How much £110,000 per home

How long Seven months

Code for sustainable homes Level 4

SAP rating Likely to exceed 7

Environmental impact 89

Funding £75,000 is the most commonly quoted cost of building a straw bale home. It’s way off the mark, advises Michael Gadd, property manager at the council, who says the figure applies to self-build properties. North Kesteven has budgeted £110,000 per property, which includes the contractor’s fee and sustainable materials. ‘We could have done it a lot cheaper and a lot quicker using much less expensive materials,’ adds Mr Gadd.

The property manager hopes the second pair of semis in the nearby village of Martin, will come in under budget, ‘because we’ve learnt
all the lessons’.

All four of North Kesteven’s straw homes are funded equally by the council and the Homes and Communities Agency, which has awarded the authority £3.7 million to build 35 new homes for rent, including the straw dwellings.

It’s a question to pose: why do people want to build with straw?’ It’s a strange question, coming as it does from the man who will soon be able to add ‘building the UK’s first straw bale council houses’ to his CV, before embarking on building some more. But then Michael Gadd, property manager at North Kesteven Council, has found his own answer to that question change several times throughout the groundbreaking project.

The pair of straw semis in the Lincolnshire village of Waddington, which will hit level four of the code for sustainable homes when completed in March, were conceived two years ago as an exemplar project to encourage local people to build their own energy efficient homes. When funding difficulties put paid to the self-build promotion plan, the only way to get the homes started was to build them for social rent using some of the council’s £3.7 million in Homes and Communities Agency development grant.

Now the project had a different aim. ‘The emphasis changed in our minds,’ explains Mr Gadd. Instead of using the homes as a training programme for potential self-builders, it became ‘to get contractors and designers to accept it as a method of construction’. Straw construction, a US import, arrived in the UK as recently as 1994. Since then it has mainly been used by self-builders. Mr Gadd knows of just two contractor-built straw buildings: a commercial development in Essex and a community hall in Yorkshire.

‘Find a contractor who’s willing to learn… [or] you will have a fight every step of the way,’ advises Mr Gadd. North Kesteven picked local contractors and straw-bale virgins Taylor Pearson, whose staff received onsite training from straw construction experts from not-for-profit designers Amazonail.

Sourcing certain materials, such as the lime rendering and sheep’s wool insulation, was tricky. ‘At the moment they are not standard, off-the-shelf materials. The argument is that if everyone started using them they would become more readily available. General builders merchants don’t stock them,’ says Mr Gadd.

Using more traditional materials to insulate the home would have been both cheaper and, ultimately, made no difference to the properties’ energy efficiency - a projected SAP rating of at least 74. Which is when the real questions started.

‘You’ve got to think about what you’re actually trying to achieve,’ cautions Mr Gadd.

‘Are you trying to build energy efficient houses or eco-friendly and green houses, because there’s a difference between the two, and we’ve switched between the two.’

It’s a question more and more landlords could find themselves facing. Mr Gadd says other providers have visited the scheme seeking inspiration, with more scheduled. ‘Part of the idea was to prove it could be done so others can follow,’ he says. Job done.

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