The Founder of Patagonia Just Built a Straw Bale House. He Thinks You Should, Too

Yvon Chouinard thinks a lot about straw these days. More specifically, about how such a widely available agricultural byproduct makes for an ideal building material. In fact, the concept of straw bale construction had seeded in his mind long ago, even before he established Patagonia in 1973.

"In the ’60s, people were talking a lot about straw bale houses and mud houses, adobe, stuff like that... but that kind of disappeared," he told me. "And I have a habit of getting interested in something—and the idea kind of sticks in the back of my head for years and years and decades even, and then it just kind of erupts."

Last year, Chouinard and his family famously donated the retail giant he founded, valued at $3 billion, to a trust and a nonprofit group to use its enormous profits to fight climate change and support environmental work. In a statement, he explained why they opted not to sell the operation and donate the proceeds, or to transition it to public ownership, which, as indicated, is susceptible to prioritizing short-term profit over long-term responsibility.

Today, the octogenarian Time Magazine included in its list of "100 most influential people of 2023" hopes to convey the urgency of building better, a salient message given that the building sector produces more than a third of all global greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2021, Chouinard teamed up with architect Dylan Johnson, a family friend and fellow climbing enthusiast, to design and build a 2,200-square-foot straw bale home in Ventura County, which was completed this past summer. These days, while Chouinard tries to spend most of his time surfing and fishing, he still works for Patagonia, which produced a short film on straw bale building that features the homesite. But he pursued the project independently, on his own dime, to create a kind of showcase for the public.

And there’s certainly reason to believe that building with straw—a tradition that far predates the 1960s, going back millennia—may be experiencing more than a mere moment. In the U.S., building codes have recently begun recognizing straw bale construction as a legitimate prescriptive building system. With the 2019 code cycle in California, for instance, local jurisdictions are now mandated to adopt the new Straw Bale Building Code, which will help standardize such construction and streamline the permitting process.

In a phone call, Chouinard and Johnson discussed the project in Ventura—and the many merits of straw bale construction.

Dwell: How did you become interested in straw bale construction and what led you to pursuing it?

Yvon Chouinard: People were talking a lot about building straw bale homes and other alternative building materials back in the ’60s, but it was mostly all pretty weird stuff and never really caught on. And I’d been thinking about it since then. Now, still, if you go by tract homes, it’s all two-by-fours and two-by-sixes—we’re doing everything the same way and it needs to change. So I thought, well, my wife and I had this lot in kind of a middle-class neighborhood in Ventura and we decided, let’s build a straw bale house. Instead of just talking about it, let’s do it and prove it’s a better house and more responsible. I’ve always believed in market forces, so that’s what we did. We’re going to use the house as a demonstration.

Dylan Johnson: Around the year 2001 when I was 19 or 20, my aunt and uncle built a straw bale house and I helped with the construction side of things. I became fascinated by how they were building this great home with wheat straw that came from just a mile or two down the road in this rural community in Central Washington. It’s really cold there in winter and we first built a shop-type structure, and I remember it was 21 degrees [Fahrenheit] outside in January but inside the building it was 65, with no heat on. It was really impressive. This is an incredibly low-tech, resource-conscious way of building that worked extremely well. So, it was always on mind as I went through architecture school.