60m2 Straw House: 39m Facade for 67.5m2 Living Space

Long straw house: 39m of wall for 67.5m2 usable space

What is the real cost of sunshine? A 60m2 straw house plan, 4.5m deep and 15m long, with a southeast orientation and a glass wall bringing the patio into the living room, has sparked a debate about the bill, not the drawing. The idea is to receive morning light in the kitchen and workshop, keep the bedroom away from the sunrise — "in case you want to sleep in" — and spend as little as possible on heating with straw bales in the envelope and adobe in the partitions. The developer summarizes without shame: the elongated shape "is very common in bioclimatic architecture" and exists to save on heating.

All objections, known and unknown, have piled up on top of this premise. From the bathroom next to the kitchen to the suspicion that the house will be taken by the first wolf that blows.

What the straw house plan proposes

It is a one-person home, designed for Castellón or the Murcia coast. No hallway: to get to the bedroom you must cross the workshop, and this saved partition is a declared argument. Kitchen and bathroom annexed to share pipes, kitchen to the east to have breakfast with natural light, cross window at the other end to ventilate in summer, and stairs to the basement that would be executed within the workshop itself. The bedroom has no window on the sunrise facade, with the option to open one if the user prefers to wake up with the sun in bed.

The plans have been drawn using Sweet Home 3D, version after version, moving the bathroom each time. And each move has reactivated the same fight.

The bathroom next to the kitchen: siphons, septic tanks, and pipe smells

Placing the bathroom next to the kitchen is as old as plumbing: they share downpipes and save on piping. In an isolated house, the calculation goes awry. According to one participant, since there is no sewerage, the destination would be a septic tank, and a septic tank breathes. Some argue that vapors can travel through the pipe and appear in the kitchen or living room depending on the wind, and that one does not feel like having dinner with that background. The reply is from a manual: for that there are siphons, as long as they have water, nothing happens, and several can be placed. Someone who lives with the bathroom next to the kitchen certifies: well done and well insulated, no problem.

The nuance that slips through the sustancia ilegal is that everything depends on the wind direction and the quality of the execution. There is no standard that resolves it, only accumulated experience.

Rectangle against square: where the money goes

Here is the number that orders the entire discussion. According to the calculation used in the thread, with the rectangular distribution, 39m of facade are built to enjoy 67.5m2 of surface area, and with those same meters of facade, being square, the house would give 95m2. The yield per meter of wall skyrockets, and on top of that, the narrow floor plan adds energy losses: the more elongated, the greater the incidence of the sun and the more envelope to heat or cool. The balance, say those with expertise, is not 1:3. And with 4.5m of depth, a family-type R-21 car does not fit in the garage: one must resort to compact cars.

Straw walls and the 7m limit without bracing

The author himself discovers halfway that self-supporting walls of the Nebraska system do not admit more than 7m without bracing, a reinforcement that prevents lateral buckling. It is American legislation; this standard does not exist here, and the technique remains unstudied. His proposal is to tie the lower plinth and the upper perimeter beam so that the wall does not bulge to the sides. The technicians' response is the usual one: a home is signed by an architect, not a pretty drawing.

And the classic warning arrives about the overzealous person who gets tangled: they tend to oversize structures. In a 1.5m2 dog house, that is 40 euros more. In a house, it is another scale.

Crossing the workshop to sleep: hallways, noise, and nighttime pee

Eliminating the hallway saves meters, but changes life inside the house. Crossing a workshop to go to bed means that the bedroom storage loads against the common wall and that any workshop task leaks into rest. The technical alternative is known: two doors isolate acoustically much more than a single one, even if it is of high quality, and the bedroom gains if it has the bathroom next to it, both for nighttime pees and for dressing after the shower without parading through the house. The washing machine, by the way, would fit better in the bathroom than in the kitchen, and the entrance door should not clash with the kitchen door when opening.

For visitors, the hidden and distant bathroom has its charm. For visitors and for the resident.

Because in the end, the house comes down to an uncomfortable question: if to have breakfast with sun you must raise 39m of facade and cross a workshop to sleep, perhaps the sun did not come out so cheap. Although, dealing with straw, it will not be the wolf who bursts the budget.