A television advertising campaign by Irish concrete manufacturers cleverly enlists the help of the Three Little Pigs to trot home their view that concrete is the best building material.

The smart porker builds his home with concrete blocks (not bricks), while his dimmer siblings fall foul of the big bad wolf because of their self-build efforts in straw and sticks.

The campaign is actually targeting timber-frame and timber-built homes, but perhaps they should be targeting straw as well, because an experiment under way in west Cork is set to determine whether straw-build is practical in Ireland’s damp weather.

There are just eight straw bale-built homes in Ireland, which may not be sufficient to put the frighteners on our block manufacturers just yet, but Quentin Gargan and Clare Watson, acting as guinea pigs, may be about to change that.

Both lifelong environmentalists, Gargan founded a successful business 20 years ago selling organic food, while Watson grew up on one of Ireland’s oldest organic farms, dating from 1962.

With a view to helping the environment, the couple bought a mountainside property in west Cork with a dilapidated cottage and a barn attached. “We were planning on trying out a practical self-sufficient lifestyle whereby we could house, power and feed ourselves in the most comfortable way possible,” says Gargan.

This would involve growing their own food, raising livestock and investigating alternative energy techniques. Building an alternative home of any sort, however, was initially not on the cards.

“We had hoped to renovate the cottage but previous owners had added an extra concrete floor, which had pushed out the lower floor walls. It was too expensive to contemplate,” says Gargan.

They visited the nearby Hollies Centre for Practical Sustainability, where Rob Hopkins offers instruction in both straw bale-build and cob-build construction methods — cob being a traditional method using compacted earth.

The couple chose straw bales but decided to use a different technique from that extolled by the Hollies Centre. “They were promoting straw bale-build as a load-bearing technique, the straw bale walls supporting the roof,”

says Gargan. “But because we wanted to be flexible, we chose another technique. We wanted the timber frame support technique, whereby a timber frame supports the roof and the straw bale simply provides the filling.”

The couple were not convinced that straw bale-build — which provides walls of farm straw bales stacked and rendered on two sides — could cope with Ireland’s driving rain. “We were building in one of Ireland’s wettest regions and on a raised site,” says Gargan. “If the straw bale walls didn’t work, the timber-frame-supported system would allow us to simply kick out the bales and replace them with timber.”

As a result of their extensive research and visits to other straw bale builders, Watson and Gargan were able to reduce the chance of any nasty surprises.

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