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Are you prepared for the Cob Cottage? This can be a constructing technique so outdated and so easy that it has been all however forgotten within the rush to synthetics. A cob cottage, nonetheless, is perhaps the final word expression of ecological design, a construction so attuned to its environment that its creators confer with it as “an ecstatic home.”
The authors construct a home the best way others create a pure backyard. They use the oldest, most out there supplies imaginable–earth, clay, sand, straw, and water–and mix them to redefine the longer term (and previous) of constructing. Cob (the phrase comes from an Outdated English root, which means “lump”) is a mix of non-toxic, recyclable, and infrequently free supplies. Constructing with cob requires no varieties, no cement, and no equipment of any sort. Builders truly sculpt their constructions by hand.
Constructing with earth is nothing new to America; the oldest constructions on the continent have been constructed with adobe bricks. Adobe, nonetheless, has been geographically restricted to the Southwest. The bounds of cob are outlined solely by the builder’s creativeness.
Cob presents solutions concerning our function in Nature, household and society, about why we really feel the ways in which we do, about what’s lacking in our lives. Cob comes as a revelation, a key to a saner world.
Cob has been a standard constructing course of for millennia in Europe, even in wet and windy climates just like the British Isles, the place many cob buildings nonetheless function household houses after a whole bunch of years. The method is newly arrived to the Americas, and, as with so many social developments, the early adopters are within the Pacific Northwest.
Cob homes (or cottages, since they’re at all times effectively small by American development requirements) will not be solely suitable with their environment, they ARE their environment, actually rising up from the earth. They’re full of sunshine, energy-efficient, and comfortable, with curved partitions and built-in, whimsical touches. They’re pleasant. They’re ecstatic.
