Grow your own hemp house

Text & Fotografie Maren Krings

a zero kilometer house build by hand

In his memory, Kristaps Eglitis recalls the taste of the traditional latvian hempseedbutter from the lush and colorful markets and the smell of the hemp flowers. These memories date back to his childhood in rural latvia some forty years ago.

When he first heard people start talking about CBD he didn’t even know that this was one of many cannabinoids deriving from the hemp plant. It wasn’t until 2015, when hemp caught his attention for real, that Kristaps found out that there was a way to build houses from hempcrete. From that moment on until the development and release of the hemp micro Decorticator at the end of 2019, named „Hurdmaster“ by Kristaps, was an arduous journey filled with discoveries about the plant and invention to use its full potential. In his early twenties, Kristaps finished a formal training as Arts & Crafts metal Designer and continued his father's metal workshop in the second generation, dedicating all his time and passion into jewelry and industrial metal welding. The desire to combine functional design and man-made objects is Kristaps’ trademark and led him to dream about eventually also building his own family home.

This was the moment when his hands-on work ethic paired up with hemp’s versatile forms of use. It was in Poland, where Kristaps met his mentor the Belgian Wolf Jordan, sparking the idea to build a home from hempcrete. The family of six was looking into relocating outside of the busy city center of Riga, yearning for more time in nature and space to expand, with four children in the process of growing up. Kristaps’ dream of a hempcrete home grew stronger and stronger, benefitted by the family compound, halfway in-between the capital Riga and the Baltic Sea, in the city of Ādaži, which offered the perfect playground to make this dream become reality. The premises of the old family compound were big enough to grow a decent-sized hemp field to even produce the raw material needed for insulation works on the existing log house.

This option helped Kristaps overcome the struggle to find the raw material for the building process in his own country. The hurds or shives made from the inner core of the woody hemp stalk, mixed with limestone and a binder are the basic main ingredient of hempcrete. Not even with the help of the Latvian hemp community did he succeed to find hemp hurds in Latvia. As the seedlings started to peek out of the field surrounding the future family home the need grew to find a way to process the hemp, which would be ready for harvest in only three and a half months. Instead of a processing line that would take care of this step, Kristaps found the bulky invention of Australian-Latvian Voldemars Cirulis, who had build a medium-sized, yet inefficient Decorticator, separating the hurds from the bast fibre of the plant.

His technical genius kicked in and immediately he started to redevelop the existing machine into a much smaller and more efficient device, which could easily be transported in his car from the metal workshop to the countryside premise of Ādaži. What started as a self-help invention to get closer to his personal dream of building his own family home, developed into a sturdy, highly efficient small-scale Decorticator, designed for hemp growers, wishing to be independent of distant processing lines and costly transportation of the raw material for the building process. The hurds are only one of many products the Hurdmaster manages to produce. To legitimate the price of 10.000 Euro per machine, it’s able to produce animal bedding, animal litter, plant bedding and fertilizer alongside to the hurds. With a little future add-on, it will even be able to separate the highly valuable hemp fibre.

Only a year after meeting Wolf Jordan Kristaps is busy spending almost every weekend out in the countryside making hempcrete and building bit by bit the outer walls of the house. As the thermometers marks a heatwave passing over Latvia during midsummer of 2019, Greta and Frida, the youngest daughters of the family lunge into the black, waterfilled construction buckets to cool down. Giggles and laughter fill the air, while Kristaps is chasing the girls out of his building material to continue mixing the hempcrete on this hot summer day. Just another couple centimeters of wall-building, then it is time to prepare for the mid-summer celebration the family plans to have in the middle of the growing hemp field. It was the girls' idea to pay tribute to the hemp plants, growing beautifully despite the drought and heat, which is making it hard for the vegetables to continue growing in the garden.

It is Frieda's idea to bring the rainmaker alongside the traditional music instrument called Trejdeksnis to the ceremony. „It is amazing to see the hemp plants grow a centimeter a day even during this heat“, says Kristaps while collecting some rhubarb growing under the protective shade of the hemp. The water tank is nearly empty and the vines at stake, as they have not been able to develop anymore since the draught started weeks ago. It’s with excitement in his voice, that Kristaps lists the numerous benefits of growing hemp: “In the beginning, I just thought about building a home-grown home, but I found a list of positive benefits after growing hemp for the first time in 2018. It’s cleaning the soil and prepares it for other crops the next year. It also absorbs much more CO2 than I will emit during the building process. The amount of CO2 that hemp stores during growth is a rough 67% of what society mitts with transportation, in households and factories. And indeed I am excited about the medicinal and recreational use of it as well.“ It wasn’t the main goal to build a zero kilometer home in the beginning, but the discovery of the environmental benefits impacted Kristaps heavily. „It was not easy to find a partner for the construction of the Hurdmaster and I was often inclined to give up and spare all the money I invested in the innovation to just go on a decent holiday with the whole family, but knowing that this machine would enable many other people like myself to build their own home on their own land, without producing huge carbon emissions by the transportation of the materials was just too good to give up that easily!“ Even Madara, Kristaps' wife has come to terms with her husband's invention, which often kept him in his workshop for days and nights, troubling the whole family with absence in order to develop the Hurdmaster to full proportion for the market introduction. Madara has even become the biggest fan of Kristaps' invention. Being a city person she couldn’t quite wrap her heart around the idea of living in the countryside, far away from stores and the convenience of being able to commute by bike to work to one of the big insurance companies of Riga. Already she loves the relaxed atmosphere around the new home and has become excited about the idea of living here, in a place, which is shaping the ideas of the entire family in slow steps over the years. Seeing people fall beyond the line of subsistence due to debt and an ever-changing economic situation in her country made her appreciate all levels of a hand-build home from the hemp grown in her garden. While the teenagers Marta and Fric think it to be rather cool to have a dad, who is growing hemp, the young ones Frida and Great are seeing no difference between the hemp growing in the garden to any of the other vegetable plants the family is growing.

As Greta is immersed in listening to Kristaps explaining her about the difference between the male and the female hemp plant, she is part of a first generation to grow up knowing that the is such a thing as a biological building material, safe to touch and be exposed to for children, fertilizing and nourishing the flowers in the gardens and leaving no harmful waste behind, if ever torn down or disposed of. In the children’s world, this is the stuff you can even strap an emergency plan from, in case you forgot the ball to play. Add some water, binder and limestone, press it together and wait half an hour, then you are good to play!