Small Round Cordwood Home

“There is a magic in that little world, home; it is a mystic circle that surrounds comforts and virtues never known beyond its hallowed limits” - Robert Southeby

While I've been busy with lots of reading now that graduate classes have started in earnest, we've both been reading Cordwood Building: The State Of The Art, loaned to us by our wonderful neighbors. We've given a lot of consideration to more natural construction styles versus traditional stick-built. We like straw bale, cob, and cordwood construction, but to us it seems cordwood would be most suitable to our northern New England climate.

We've also been considering shape. I really like how Cordwood Building pointed out efficiency of vertical wall square footage versus footprint, with a perfect circle being the most efficient (less vertical wall for the most square footage), with a perfect square being next most efficient and the most efficient rectangular footprint. For us we have spiritual reasons for gravitating toward a round house, as well.

At this point it looks like we're going for a round house, but we might make a quarter of it square, essentially ending up with a teardrop shaped house. We think this has some cool potential for layout options and maximizing square footage and minimizing vertical wall. Our footprint is coming out around 300sf with a loft, giving us space for a small bedroom for our son and a tiny bathroom, plus a combined living/kitchen space and the loft for our sleeping quarters. I would really like to see us build the loft in a way that we can leave some or all of the living area open cathedral-style to give more vertical space and imply a bigger area than it actually is, which really is key to tiny housing.

While we are nowhere near being ready to build anything, it's nice to design and plan now so we can work toward achieving this goal in a few years. If we approach this right, including buying appropriate, buildable land from somewhere like craigslist or eBay real inexpensive, we could potentially have our own very eco-friendly, sustainable home that we own mortgage-free and for a fraction of what traditional homeowners spend on purchasing a home. You can't really get a much better investment than that!