A low impact low cost woodland home by Simon Dale

This beautiful rustic home is a masterpiece from Simon Dale. Often referred to as a hobbit house, which is understandable if your imagination is allowed to enjoy its magic.

This style of housing allows people to build homes which blend in with the environment, rather than fighting against it. Being imbedded into the earth and the large thermal mass helps to keep temperatures stable. Warm in the winter and cool in the summer.  They have a low detrimental impact on the environment, in fact enhance it. Because more common sense is used, the cost is kept low and the result is affordable housing!

Whist the internal natural style offers food for the soul of any nature lover. The result also has the benefits of being low cost and low impact.

The style of Simon’s roof is a reciprocal frame as described by Graham Brown of Findhorn “The Reciprocal Frame is a timeless piece of nature’s wisdom that has a great resonance for our time.”This style of roof is similar to one which Tony Wrench has used in his inspirational low impact roundhouse in Pembrokeshire, famous by being put through a mammoth planning adventure.  Tony has compiled a good article also published in the Permaculture magazine, which describes how to construct a Reciprocal Frame Roof. Read how to build your own here.

Simon built the house with £3000 and about 1500 man hours, showing  how environmentally friendly and cost effective a home can be. Whilst its rustic charm will not appeal to everyone, it highlights how easy it is for people to build their own home.

To learn more about Simon’s home visit his web site here.

To learn more about Simon’s new adventure at the Lammas project visit his web page at Lammas

A low-impact settlement

Lammas in Glandwr, Pembrokeshire, Wales obtained planning permission to create an eco-village using green technology and Permaculture principles.

Their style of Eco village, truly is ‘eco’. It offers a model for low impact living that can be replicated allowing eco housing co operatives to create sustainable homes

undercurrents.org who offer inspirational news have produced 24 episodes all about Ecovillage Pioneers which can be viewed here

To view the Lammas web site, have a look here.

The 1st episode is below; Introducing Lammas

There are many other examples of Sustainable housing, some of which are listed below.

BedZED Zero Energy Development Biorgional Solutions for Sustainability

A good example of a sustainable community housing project in suburbia is Beddington Zero Energy Development or BedZED in Wallington, south London. Embracing renewable energy, co operative housing, carbon emissions, sustainable food, and sustainable transport.

Read all about it on the BedZED website

In the process BedZED together with the WWF created the One planet living principles, which have famously highlighted the danger of using resources as if there is no tomorrow! When obviously we only have the one.

One planet Living

Woodhouse wood in Carmarthenshire

Woodhouse wood in Carmarthenshire shows how to live as part of nature rather than outside it.

Read more on the woodhouse wood web site.

The Gatehouse hobbit house

The gatehouse green roof house

Another beautiful low cost, low impact sustainable home is the gatehouse green roof house, created in east Ayrshire, Scotland, by software engineer Steve James. He managed this with just over £4000 together with his labour.

Have a look at this great web site showing a beautiful picturesque tour of how and why he did it, together with optional musical accompaniment.

Low cost wood store

Another beautiful picturesque tour show plans how to build your own combined wood store and tool shed. This example is set in an old walled garden in Dumfriesshire.

Take the tour.

Steward community woodland

Steward community woodland in Moretonhampstead Devon UK, have been pioneers (since 2000) in showing how woodland can be used sustainably, offering shelter and livelihoods, whilst keeping the forest alive.

Read more about their adventure here

The California Institute of Earth Art and Architecture

The California Institute of Earth Art and Architecture Cal-Earth, founded by Nader Khalili shows how easy it is to build low cost shelters using materials local to your home. The founding philosophy is the equilibrium of the natural elements of earth, water, air, and fire.

This particular building process can be more specifically described as sustainable architecture using the superadobe method created by Nader Khalili

See the Cal-Earth web site to read more about these low cost shelters

The Low impact living initiative

The Low impact living initiative otherwise know as LILI have a huge resource of relevant information on many types of shelters, all of which offer an approach which can be low cost, and low impact to the environment.

LILI website

Earthship homes

Earthship

The famous Earthship designs are being used much more as truly sustainable buildings. Incorporating many recycled products and using natural sources of energy for the home

These are 6 principles which an Earthship incorporates

Thermal/Solar Heating & Cooling

Solar & Wind Electricity

Contained Sewage Treatment

Building with Natural & Recycled Materials

Water Harvesting

Food Production

More about the US site can be found here.

More about the Brighton Earthship can be found here.

The Global Ecovillage Network GEN

To find out more about living sustainably around the globe The Global Ecovillage Network GEN is a good source showing ecovillage’s around the world.

Low impact development book

Low Impact Development

For a free PDF(6 MB) copy of the excellent Low Impact Development edited by Jenny Pickerill and Larch Maxey download a copy here.

Although free its production relies on donations, so please be generous and donate here!

To find out more about the book have a look at the Low impact Development web site.

Diggers and dreamers

Diggers and dreamers are the people to talk with if you want to learn more about communal living in the UK. From learning how to form your own community to just helping out with one of the many already in existence. Visit the Diggers and dreamers web site here.

Chapter 7

If you are looking for help with planning procedures for low impact, sustainable housing, you will find it useful speaking with chapter 7 They have named their organisation after chapter 7 of agenda 21 that came out of the earth summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, which was aimed at addressing our Earths environmental challenges. Visit the web site here

Radical routes

Radical routes as it suggests has a radical view on changing our outlook on housing by looking at it more co operatively.  Sensible stuff, for those prepared to live more cooperatively. Visit Radical routes to find out more.

Passive house  or Passivhaus

Passive house (Passivhaus) is the penultimate in sustainable design for homes. The principles encourage a clever approach to insulation, position, heating and energy needs of a home. Essentially The house heats and cools itself, hence the name “passive”.

Wolfgang Feist and Professors Bo Adamson developed the concept and its is widely used as a benchmark to aim for in the sustainable building market. Visit the Scottish passivhaus centre web site here.

The Code for Sustainable Homes

The Code for Sustainable Homes is the uk national code being used to encourage house builders and developers to construct more efficient buildings.  More about the code here.

Green Building

The green building bibles and the green building quarterly magazines by the green building press are an amazing resource for products, ideas and contacts for anyone wanting to retrofit or new build. They show a huge range of renewable energy technologies, together with where to buy them.

The quarterly Green Building magazines can be purchased here.

The latest green building bibles can be puchased here.

Help ‘The Kaieteur Tree Planting Fund’ to continue planting trees by donating here.

Please feel free to add any updates, amendments, suggestions or comments to the post below.

Posted by Michael Horsnell