Pender Island Light Straw Clay Timber Frame Home
As a business, we always prioritize sourcing our timbers from local sawyers and foresters who take pride in the care of their woodlands. Our buildings should last, and our forests should enrich our great-grandchildren. Having a direct as possible relationship to your material sourcing helps with achieving this goal.
On this project, Austin Davies, the owner, Mark Benson and Jacques Marmen (Timber and Trowel) led this light straw clay wrapped timber-frame. The owner managed to harvest 40% of the timbers from his lot which was subsequently milled and had all the joinery cut on-site. The rest of the logs came from within a 100 km radius.
This project exemplifies the use of locally sourced materials and an attention to limiting synthetics wherever possible. The timbers were finished with tung oil for inside surfaces, and with pine tar on the exterior. the only plastic in the building is the roofing membrane and the recyclable PEX piping entombed in the slab to heat using the woodfired boiler.
The foundation utilized concretized woodchip blocks from Nexcem which are insulated with rock wool and account for a huge decrease in concrete use from traditional foundations.
We also built a ferrocement cistern up above this off-grid home. It is filled by a water-catching roof design and utilizes a small solar pump from a shallow well, effectively gravity-feeding to the tap at 40 psi.
A Family Home Built With Integrity
The center post of this timberframe is a cluster of intersections, with the most joinery of all the timbers in this frame!
This frame had more than 500 pieces shaped and finished on site.
A wrap-around timber porch runs along the whole of the exterior of the building, creating a huge amount of covered area and simultaneously protecting the light straw clay walls; breaking up the 25’ tall gable ends into two well protected sections.
Perlite Insulated Slab
This slab was insulated with a continous layer of perlite- 8” thick; layed down perlite bags tightly, compacted gently in place, bedded with sand, laid pex in floor heating pipe, metal reinforcement, and poured concrete floor.
Ferrocement Cistern
This home featured a ferrocement cistern located on a hill above the house, generating 40psi with gravity alone. Water was pumped with solar power from a well on the property, as well as caught by the curved ferrocement roof with built-in screened openings for rainwater. this is a 100000 litre cistern, using zero plastics!
