BROOKINGS, S.D. -- How far would you go to get a house that only costs $1.25 a day to heat in the winter? Better question: Would you live in a house built with straw bales? That idea, which began in ...

While the idea of building with straw bales is not new, the eco-friendly approach to building has been gaining interest in the past 15 years. In the low-tech method, bales of straw are typically ...

Interior designer Marcia Wolff wanted a house that's energy-efficient, ecologically sensitive, fire-resistant and, above all, beautiful. So she chose a building material that might surprise some ...

When we moved into our house, there was a shed in the garden. Its timbers were rotten, the floor had long since disappeared into the ground, there was no door, the window had fallen out and various ...

When Mike Evans and his colleagues at the Tree of Life Nursery near San Juan Capistrano, Calif., began constructing some of their buildings in straw more than 10 years ago, they had good reasons: · ...

Richard Venberg owned a custom furniture/cabinet shop in Colorado when he took a major step toward becoming an architect and one of Minnesota’s leading advocates of straw-bale construction. “Basically ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Photo Credit: YouTube Dan Durica, a longtime resident of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Missouri, built his own straw bale home for ...