In this section…
Celtic Roundhouse
Robina McCurdy and her partner Huckleberry Leonard started building their earth home in early 2005, with the help of a number of interns attending Robina's ecological building course at Tui Community in Golden Bay.
The house is a reciprocating roundhouse structure, based on an ancient Celtic design. That design was researched and documented by Welshman Tony Wrench in his book "The Low Impact Roundhouse".
Tony guided the initial stages of the process long-distance and local earth building architect and engineer, Richard Walker, acted as consultant on the project, drawing up the plans and submitting them for building consent. Richard also tutored the team in earth building methods.
The house is 7 metres in diameter, has 13 poles and a skylight with an extension for a semi-outdoor kitchen and bathroom. The walls are partly adobe (mud-brick) and partly cobb while the extension walls are partly stone.
The roundhouse floor is made of hexagonal earth tiles. Other features of the design include rainwater collection, a greywater treatment system and a composting toilet (similar in design to the DoC toilets in our National parks).
The roundhouse is being built on Tui Community in Golden Bay and the building process is being used as a learning experience for people wanting to gain hands-on ecological building skills.
In the past two years 60 people from a diversity or countries around the world, most in their 20's, have participated in the building project. They have left the course with building skills, community experience and, according to Robina, in many cases with a clearer sense of their life direction.
Robina applied for a loan from Prometheus in mid-2006 for finance to complete this building project. As the roundhouse is being built on land owned by the Tui Spiritual and Educational Trust the land itself could not be used as equity and so we had to be more flexible in how we arranged the security for this loan.
