Ben's amazing chestnut timber framed house was hewn from his own woodland. He infilled the frame with local straw bales and plastered them with his own clay and locally sourced lime. the roof was made from chestnut shingles and the weatherboard is local hand-milled oak. He even made his own window frames out of hand planed ash. He built the whole structure for under 28,000 British pounds with the help of volunteers, with no crane, no waste, no skip and not a unit of electricity off the national grid. His electricity comes from the sun and wind, his heat from wood and solar hot water panels and his water from a spring and the sky. His greywater is purified by a reedbed system and his compost loo feeds the fruit trees in his orchard.
The Woodland House gives details of the evolving design process, identifying materials, costs, project management, and the actual building. It proves that low cost, low impact, and high aesthetics can go hand in hand, and that it is possible to build green and to build affordably.
In the United States, Ben will appear on the Home & Garden Network’s The World’s Most Extreme Homes , a series with more than seventeen million viewers per episode, in the spring of 2006.
