BY LINDA EGENES
Dirt. Mud. Clay. Cob. Cob building is an ancient way to build with earth, used most famously in England to create picturesque cottages with thatched roofs. There are many advantages to cob building—it can be warm in winter and cool in summer, it’s natural, nontoxic and beautiful, and it costs very little.
Lin Mullenneaux works on the cob house in progress. For more photos and updates, see http://hapnlin.com/the-cob-house/.
Just ask Hap and Lin Mullenneaux, a Fairfield couple in their 50’s who recently sculpted their own cob home with the help of friends and family.
The total cost for their modest 14×18’ two-storey cottage? Just $7000. And half of that was for the green metal roof and sturdy Pella windows.
Labor of Love
It all started in the summer of 2007, when the Mullenneauxs attended a workshop at Cob Cottage Company in Oregon with Ianto Evans and Linda Smiley, who have promoted cob building around the globe through workshops and their book, The Hand-Sculpted House.
After their trip to Oregon, Hap and Lin traveled to England, where they met the young British cob builders, Adam Weismann and Katy Bryce. Adam, who grew up in Iowa City, met Katy while studying documentary filmmaking in London. They also learned cob building in Oregon and have gone on to win awards for their work in England.
Back home in Iowa last fall, Hap and Lin purchased a $700 camper on eBay, parked it on their land near Fairfield’s Abundance Eco Village, and moved in. They planted trees, built a hoop greenhouse that serves as an open-air garden in summer, constructed the three-sided rustic wood shed that serves as their outdoor kitchen, shower and workshop.
When spring came they started constructing the cob cottage, with the help of over 50 volunteers.
I was one of those volunteers, helping Lin mix the cob on tarps, using buckets of clay substrata dug from their own land, buckets of sand, water and straw. We mashed it with our feet, formed it into lumps with our hands, and tossed it fire-bucket-brigade style to Hap, who slapped it on the wall to meld with other cobs into a solid earthen mass.
An Experiment in Sustainability
A few months later, on a cold November day, I visit Hap and Lin in their completed cottage. They’ve covered the cob walls with a water-resistant render made of cow dung, earth, and straw and white-washed that with lime. It’s a fairytale place, with a limestone foundation, a green metal roof to catch rainwater, and a periwinkle blue door. It sits comfortably on the land, like it grew there.
Winds are gusting up to 35 mph, but the 18” earthen walls keep the cottage snug and warm, even without the wood stove going, their only source of heat.
It’s the first time I’ve seen the finished interior, and I feel like I’m being hugged by nature. Plaster walls—made by Lin from a mixture of kaolin clay, sand, straw, wheat paste and cattail fiber—are smooth and curvy, like sculpted stone. Sturdy benches carved out of cob, beams of round pine logs that Hap cleared as deadwood from the local forest, and a winding slate staircase to the sleeping loft add rustic charm. Coat hooks are made of tree branches.
Hap has built a kitchen counter out of old planks, stained golden with the dark brown grain making an intricate pattern. A friend gave him some walnut boards that had been sitting outside for seven years and Hap made them into shelves that hold Mason jars of beans and grains. Cast iron pans and bunches of dried garlic and fennel from Lin’s garden hang from the rafters.
Lin offers me a seat on one of the sculpted cob benches, shaped like a couch and covered with sheepskins. Hap sits in his rocking chair next to the built-in walnut book shelves and computer shelf. A wire to power the computer is the only electricity in the home, and eventually that will be powered by solar panels.
“Do you want to see the cowboy bathtub we’re looking for?” he asks. It’s a small galvanized tin tub with curved sides like an upside down cowboy hat. It will fit in the sleeping loft, and an Amish pump will supply water — heated on their wood stove — through a copper pipe.
“This is an experiment in sustainability,” says Hap.
Hap and Lin hope to inspire and teach others to build their own homes with natural materials. Hap is the treasurer of the Sustainable Living Coalition, which is creating a campus adjacent to the Mullenneaux homestead and Abundance Eco Village. It will include a center for sustainable living and courses on permaculture and natural building. Already, some of the volunteers on the Mullenneaux house are starting their own cob building projects in Fairfield.
Built by Nature
Hap notes that their home’s interior, with its rounded niches and undulating walls, is a result of the flowing nature of cob building.
“It’s a comforting space,” says Lin, who feels that what’s missing in modern architecture is the curved line—the feminine element, the comfort of the mother.
“When you use uniform materials, straight boards and sheet rock, the result is something straight and rigid,” says Hap. “With cob building, it’s easier to be round than straight, and you naturally create more curved, gentle shapes. Every cob home is unique. You’re never going to feel that oppressive uniformity in a cob home”.
Hap has also thought a lot about the difference between natural building and green building.
“’Green’ is a term that is getting over-used and abused these days.” he says. “I’d define ‘natural’ building as using unprocessed materials as much as possible.”
He lists what he feels to be natural, unprocessed materials: round wood, clay soil, stone, sand, straw. “When you use materials in the form that nature made them, you have to work cooperatively with nature. They start to shape the creation—they design the home.”
“It’s like fitting together the pieces of a puzzle,” adds Lin. “You can’t decide it all ahead of time.”
“You find the stone and see where it belongs,” says Hap. “For the builder, it’s a 180º change. Instead of a fixed design, your evolving design takes shape based on the materials at hand—the round trees you cut down for your beams, the old boards your friend gives you for your kitchen shelves, or a limestone outcropping that becomes your foundation.”
“Or the window you find behind your friend’s barn,” says Lin, gesturing above Hap’s head, where purple and blue-tinted clouds float in a rectangular window frame, making me think of Georgia O’Keefe’s spectacular painting, “Sky Above the Clouds.”
“The house comes into being as a co-creation with nature,” says Hap. “It’s much more of an artistic process.”
Hap and Lin say they had two goals when they started: to build a sustainable home that allowed them to spend most of their time outdoors, and to avoid going to the bank for a mortgage. And they were able to achieve both.
“I get it,” I say as I say good-bye. “This is like playing house, like not having to be a being a grown-up.”
Hap and Lin laugh and say in unison, “That’s it exactly.”
To see Hap and Lin’s Cob House Journal, go to www.pbase.com/hapm/ourhouse.
(I originally wrote this article for Radish Magazine, January 2009. Reprinted with permission. For more photos and updates, see http://hapnlin.com/the-cob-house/)
