Lots of houses look good. Lots more feel good to be in. Very few are good to touch. Architect Féile Butler’s is – because it is made of cob.
An ancient building material that combines clay and straw, her hand-built Sligo home, Mud and Wood, was the culmination of a longstanding interest in sustainable living that peaked in a 10-day workshop in cob building she attended back in the mid-2000s.
That prompted her to build her own cob house which, alongside carpenter husband Colin Ritchie, she did, starting in 2008.
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Two years, 10 months and two children later, at the end of November 2010, the couple moved in.
“I love it. It’s almost like another personality,” says Butler. “What I love is that visitors always touch the house. That’s not something you see a lot in architecture. There are lots of curves and soft shapes, lots of wood, and no hard corners. It’s designed to touch.”
Touch is a sense she believes is too often missing from architecture.
“It always makes me laugh when I see architecture magazines which operate on the principle that evidence of human life is too messy for magazine photos.
“That’s not our house. And some houses look very beautiful but must be like living in an art gallery. Our house is not like that.”
Because the materials used in a cob house are found locally, people assume it’s a low-cost building option. That is not necessarily so.
Insulation
“I think people think it is a cheap method of building, and yes, some of the materials are free, such as the earth, but others that you use are of conservation grade and so are more expensive, such as insulation and rendering, for example.”
Where Butler and Ritchie did save money where they used their own skills to build.
Butler points out: “What we say is that it shouldn’t be any more expensive than a standard house, but what you get at the end is not a standard house.
“Part of the reason it took us so long to build was that every single part of the house was built from scratch.
“We bought no doors or window frames, for example. Everything started out as a tree trunk from the woods.”
In the end, their 130sq m (1,400sq ft) home cost €80 per sq ft, compared with an average of €120, she says. And it is as durable as it is beautiful.
“A cob house will last as long as anybody’s house. I do a lot of conservation work and I see cob houses that are 200 and 300 years old.
“They do have to be maintained, particularly the roof and the tops of walls but, for us, the lovely thing is that when, in hundreds of years time, their purpose as a house is gone – they just decay back into the land.”
And in another perfect circle of life, Butler now runs her own cob-building workshops, so that others can enjoy the pleasures of a truly “feel-good” home.
For more information see mudandwood.com.
