Customer Reviews

Building a Low Impact Roundhouse (Simple Living)

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In 1993, Tony Wrench evolved the concept of permaculture land, a low impact sustainable way of life which included self-build with local materials, appropriate technology and food growing. In 1997 he and his partner built and moved into a low impact roundhouse. This is his story, both a moving and witty account of realising a lifetime's dream, and a practical 'how to' manual for anyone who is able to 'lift a rafter'. Tony shares his skills and techniques from the process of visualising and designing a house to lifting the living roof, infilling the walls laying out rooms and adding renewable, autonomous technology. A must for anyone interested in low impact living and cordwood construction.
Highly recommended.

If you're looking to build a low-impact, woodland, or roundhouse this is a wonderful resource. You won't find a whole bunch of complicated math or charts, just simple straight-forward "this is what we did and it works" narration. Valuable info on things that did and didn't work as expected, and ideas of what might work better. All-in-all a great read that had me laughing and gave me confidence to go out into the woods and build my own.

Wonderful do-it-yourself book providing a good balance of practical and technical information. In short; practical, informative, great illustrations, easy to read, great conversation piece. I wish it came in hard-back.

My partner and I used this book as a guide when building our own roundhouse. We both had quite a lot of building experience but still found the book both useful and inspiring during our build.

As a launching pad for your own ideas and plans this book is excellent.

It made me laugh and look the life at the brighter side. Also, it' made me want to take the shovel and build the house right after reading. Maybe I will. Just buy the book. This IS a musthave.

Americans tend not to pay as much attention to "locally sourced" products as the British. I found I needed to see how others saw this. Wrench bring this home, he agonizes about using an imported superior product on his roof. Where I'd gone ahead and bought Austrian 2x4's in Tennessee.

In addition his round house has a reciprocating roof. He tells us how he made it. There is at least one site giving the math for it, he's not going to.

If one of us tried to build his way, we'd probably end up with one of the, ahem, now blessedly disintegrated houses from the back-to-the-land movement of the 70's. But Wrench shows that it can be done, and reasonably well.