The very well built, two storey strawbale passive house by Hiberna, as visited on the EBANZ AGM house tour.
Where did the story begin? If I had to draw a line in the sand, it would be the first sketches Ben and I did of a small strawbale house before we were married. It was 2007 and Ben was doing his carpentry apprenticeship and I was a sustainable building consultant, and we lived in a lovely but freezing house in Wanaka (the kind in which you need three duvets on the bed plus hats and thermals at night). Things stalled for five years or so due to travel, marriage and children, but sometime in 2012 we sat down to design the house afresh. 2012 was also the year I did the Certified Passive House Designer training.
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SPRING 2020
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had first learned about the standard in 2004 as part of my Masters in Environmental Architecture in the UK, where at that time it was politely dismissed as some weird German idea… I then flirted with the idea of making our house Passive House, but abandoned it, thinking it would not fit with the natural, handcrafted ideal that we still hold dear. The first design, which was consented in 2014, was one and a half storeys, strawbale downstairs and timber frame upstairs, relatively complex in form and we loved it. We sensibly (we thought) designed a large strawbale garage which we intended to live in “while we built the house.” It
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