The Founder of Patagonia Just Built a Straw Bale House. He Thinks You Should, Too

Yvon Chouinard thinks a lot about straw these days. More specifically, about how such a widely available agricultural byproduct makes for an ideal building material. In fact, the concept of straw bale construction had seeded in his mind long ago, even before he established Patagonia in 1973.

"In the ’60s, people were talking a lot about straw bale houses and mud houses, adobe, stuff like that... but that kind of disappeared," he told me. "And I have a habit of getting interested in something—and the idea kind of sticks in the back of my head for years and years and decades even, and then it just kind of erupts."

Last year, Chouinard and his family famously donated the retail giant he founded, valued at $3 billion, to a trust and a nonprofit group to use its enormous profits to fight climate change and support environmental work. In a statement, he explained why they opted not to sell the operation and donate the proceeds, or to transition it to public ownership, which, as indicated, is susceptible to prioritizing short-term profit over long-term responsibility.

Today, the octogenarian Time Magazine included in its list of "100 most influential people of 2023" hopes to convey the urgency of building better, a salient message given that the building sector produces more than a third of all global greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2021, Chouinard teamed up with architect Dylan Johnson, a family friend and fellow climbing enthusiast, to design and build a 2,200-square-foot straw bale home in Ventura County, which was completed this past summer. These days, while Chouinard tries to spend most of his time surfing and fishing, he still works for Patagonia, which produced a short film on straw bale building that features the homesite. But he pursued the project independently, on his own dime, to create a kind of showcase for the public.

And there’s certainly reason to believe that building with straw—a tradition that far predates the 1960s, going back millennia—may be experiencing more than a mere moment. In the U.S., building codes have recently begun recognizing straw bale construction as a legitimate prescriptive building system. With the 2019 code cycle in California, for instance, local jurisdictions are now mandated to adopt the new Straw Bale Building Code, which will help standardize such construction and streamline the permitting process.

In a phone call, Chouinard and Johnson discussed the project in Ventura—and the many merits of straw bale construction.

Dwell: How did you become interested in straw bale construction and what led you to pursuing it?

Yvon Chouinard: People were talking a lot about building straw bale homes and other alternative building materials back in the ’60s, but it was mostly all pretty weird stuff and never really caught on. And I’d been thinking about it since then. Now, still, if you go by tract homes, it’s all two-by-fours and two-by-sixes—we’re doing everything the same way and it needs to change. So I thought, well, my wife and I had this lot in kind of a middle-class neighborhood in Ventura and we decided, let’s build a straw bale house. Instead of just talking about it, let’s do it and prove it’s a better house and more responsible. I’ve always believed in market forces, so that’s what we did. We’re going to use the house as a demonstration.

Dylan Johnson: Around the year 2001 when I was 19 or 20, my aunt and uncle built a straw bale house and I helped with the construction side of things. I became fascinated by how they were building this great home with wheat straw that came from just a mile or two down the road in this rural community in Central Washington. It’s really cold there in winter and we first built a shop-type structure, and I remember it was 21 degrees [Fahrenheit] outside in January but inside the building it was 65, with no heat on. It was really impressive. This is an incredibly low-tech, resource-conscious way of building that worked extremely well. So, it was always on mind as I went through architecture school.

Why do you think the time is ripe, so to speak, and people have been getting more interested in recent years?

Yvon: I tell people this a lot: "If you think you believe in climate change and you don’t do anything about it then you don’t believe in climate change." If you know how dire the consequences are, you’d damn well be doing something about it. So, instead of using materials and processes that continue adding to the problem, why not look at other options. And think about it, with less than five percent of all the rice straw that we produce each year in this country, we can build a million 2,000-square-foot homes. And all this waste material—there’s really not a whole lot of use for straw, I mean, maybe bedding for show horses, or something—it can capture a lot of carbon and seal it up if it’s used this way.

Not to mention, the stuff could be a potentially decent revenue stream for farmers.

Dylan: Absolutely. Straw is a waste product produced by farms, and disposing of it requires time and effort. In the case of the farms we’re working with in California, this means discing it back into the soil. Instead, they can bale up the straw and sell it to builders, creating an additional revenue stream.

But getting back to your question, holistically, there’s a huge argument for systems like straw bale or other bio-based systems. To avoid exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius midcentury threshold, the building sector must become carbon neutral within the next 15 to 20 years. And the sector’s emissions impact is both in the embodied carbon [for construction and transportation] and in the operational side, typically calculated in 50-plus-year life cycles, which is way beyond this critical threshold. So, there’s much more emphasis needed on getting the embodied carbon as low as possible in the buildings themselves.

And when you work with a material like straw, you’re actually interrupting the natural carbon cycle in a good way, where crops are pulling carbon from the air during the growing season and then releasing it back into the atmosphere when it’s left to rot or, in the worst case, when it gets burned. But if you bale it up and stick it in a building, you’ve tied it up for decades—even centuries—so it actually becomes a sequestering solution, not only just low carbon in terms of production and transport. It’s actually going negative.

"With less than five percent of all the rice straw that we produce each year in this country, we can build a million 2,000-square-foot homes."

—Yvon Chouinard

And it’s not hard to calculate: Straw is about 40 percent carbon by weight, and one pound of carbon in the straw used in a building essentially offsets just under three pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. For every pound of carbon locked up in a bale used for building materials, 2.67 pounds of CO2 are prevented from entering the atmosphere. So, with a 50-pound bale, you have about 20 pounds of carbon, which means that 53 pounds of carbon dioxide is not being released into the air. That’s conveniently close to the weight of the bales themselves. So, say there are 500 bales in a house. At 60 pounds each, that’s 3,000 pounds of carbon dioxide not released back into the atmosphere.

Plus, while you’re sequestering all that carbon in the straw, what you’re not doing is just as important. You’re not sourcing fiberglass or other synthetic petrochemical-based materials for insulation, vapor barriers, house wrap siding, and the rest. I mean, the typical wall assembly these days is half a dozen to a dozen layers of synthetic materials that have these complex global supply chains. Straw, on the other hand, is typically readily available nearby.

How do these structures "stack up" performance-wise against conventional wood-frame buildings? I understand they’re not just energy-efficient but also pretty resilient, which is, of course, an important consideration now given the climate volatility.

Yvon: Absolutely. I mean, we seem to be still so stuck in building stick homes—inferior stick homes. We can’t keep doing that, especially with the weather becoming so extreme. If you look at what just happened in Maui, those are wooden houses, and they’re basically bombs. Either they have propane or gas, and when there’s a fire, they blow up.

Straw bale, on the other hand, is pretty fire-resistant. And it’s basically earthquake proof.

Dylan: Yes, after decades of research and testing at multiple labs, the International Code Council has included code provisions that allow straw bale construction in the most hazardous seismic zones in the country.

Yvon: In fact, we just had a little earthquake in Ojai [during Hurricane Hillary] and it shook things up pretty good. The earthquake was right beneath the house, within a mile or two, but there was no effect on that house whatsoever.

Also, in California, we have a big problem with termites anywhere along the coast. People have to treat their houses with deadly poisons every five years or so. On this house [in Ventura], we used rice straw, which has a high silica content, and that really prevents insects. And rot.

And straw bale is extremely insulating. This house has an R-value of 33, so you shouldn’t have to heat it or cool it at all. It’s dead quiet so you can put it next to a freeway and you won’t hear anything, and, in the end, it uses less wood. Also, it’s mildew proof, whereas other houses use insulation that is non-breathable, so you get mildew.

Dylan: Straw bale construction has often been categorized as a niche building type, as Bruce King called it "… for hippies in the woods." But in reality, it’s a very effective, efficient and simple way to build. The system we’ve been using includes building a post-and beam framework with wood, stacking bales between the posts, and plastering both sides of the wall. 

And it’s very adaptable. Where you live [in New Mexico], the climate is perfect for this kind of building. It’s dry and sunny but also cold in the winter and hot in the summer. That’s where straw bale can really shine, though it works well in pretty much any climate that doesn’t experience year-round high relative humidity. So, while it won’t be ideal for the Southeast, it is still great in cold and wet climates like the Pacific Northwest because you’re not living in 70 to 80 percent relative humidity all year. As long as you’re keeping liquid water away from the straw, with basic things like roof overhangs, gutters and downspouts, as you would with any wood-frame structure, you’re good. In fact, England has a long history of making buildings out of straw and cob and they’re very long-lasting.

With the projects I’ve worked on, we were calling the gas companies to take the meters away because they are highly insulating, and so it’s easy to make them all-electric and super efficient.

What did you want the house to look like? What were you hoping to accomplish?

Yvon: In my book Let My People Go Surfing, the first edition I wrote years and years ago, I talked about building an office building using straw bales, but we never did it. But we need to start doing things differently. With this project, it took us three years to get the permits to build the house. So that’s one of the reasons we did it, to establish it as a viable thing so the next person who wants to build a straw bale house in Ventura County will have a much easier time.

I didn’t want it to be this giant modern-house-on-a-hill thing that stands out. I wanted it to fit in with the neighborhood and look like a regular house. I mean, it’s a beautiful house. It’s got plaster instead of drywall and solar panels, and a fireproof roof. But it resembles a regular normal suburban house. The main takeaway is that, for the same price as building a conventional wood-frame house, we built one that is far superior in every way.

Dylan: Yeah. The goal was not a flashy piece of architecture; it was really done as proof-of-concept. We wanted to produce a house that has appeal to everyday Americans who don’t necessarily care about what’s in the walls but just want a high-quality house that’s affordable and performs well—a simple basic suburban house with flat walls and 90-degree corners, just as if it was built with drywall and stucco.

And regarding the cost, it was similar to conventional wood-framing, though I’m convinced that this is largely because it was the first time the contractors were working with straw bales. I’m confident that as crews gain more experience, the costs will come down significantly.

What are you planning for the house?

Yvon: Well, we may actually rent it out for a while to a friend of ours who works for us. But we’d really like it to become a place where people can come and see, the general public, and to hopefully become inspired to build their own [straw bale home]. Having said that, one thing to get across is that we didn’t compromise. At all. We built this house as responsibly as we could. I really think if we want to change the way we live on this planet, we don’t have to compromise. It’s called change.

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