Knowing When to Bale
KNOWING WHEN TO BALE
Knowing When to Bale
For Rachel York, a straw-bale home was the answer to her domestic riddle
By Maria Johnson
Photographs by Betsy Blake
When Rachel York moved back into her parents’ Greensboro home almost four years ago, everyone agreed it was a good thing.
Her dad was dealing with Parkinson’s Disease, and Rachel could help manage his health and keep her parents in their Lake Daniel home as long as possible.
The homecoming would help Rachel, too, because the cost of living in Maine, where she had moved in 2018 to earn a master’s degree in studio art, had shot up during the pandemic.
So Rachel, a visual artist and musician, moved into the attic bedroom of her parents’ home. Her folks, Jane and John York, both retired public school teachers, had converted her childhood bedroom into a study after she left home.
Soon, the house felt snug for three adults.
“Boundaries were hard,” says Rachel, now 37.
But her parents’ backyard was big.
So Rachel scanned the internet for information on small homes that could be built on the property. Nesting magazines call them accessory dwelling units, or ADUs.
That’s when Rachel read about straw-bale homes, which have exterior walls that are literally stuffed with bales of straw.
It’s an old idea. Humans have used straw as a building material since prehistoric times. Native Americans sometimes stuffed straw between the inner and outer layers of their teepees. European pioneers built homes with blocks of straw after the invention of mechanical balers in the late 1890s.
Modern straw-bale homes have refined the practice.
Rachel was intrigued by the idea that she might be able to have a compact, distinctive, energy-saving home on her parents’ property.
“It stuck in my brain,” she says. “I just thought it was incredible.”
More searching led her to Amanda Jane Albert, whose Greensboro business, Inhabit, designs and builds sustainable homes.
Rachel asked Amanda if she’d be interested in doing a straw-bale home for her.
Amanda was not only interested; she was experienced. Over the last several years, she had worked with nonprofits to build more than a dozen straw-bale homes for low-income families out West.
A licensed contractor since 2020, she had been wanting to try the building techniques in Greensboro.
“We needed the right client,” she says.
Rachel was that client.
Amanda drew four plans for her.
Rachel picked a 700-square-foot design with shotgun-style layout: a great room that flows into a studio, which leads to a bedroom.
Because Rachel’s neighborhood does not have a homeowners association, there is no prohibition on separate ADUs as long as they meet city zoning requirements.
But because straw-bale homes are so rare in this area — Amanda says there are about a dozen in the state, and hers is the first in Greensboro — there’s no statewide building code for the structures.
To issue permits, the Greensboro building department required Amanda to hire a licensed structural engineer, one who was experienced with residential projects, to sign off on the plan.
Construction began in July 2024 with the pouring of 18-inch-wide concrete beams above grade.
Amanda’s crew framed the home and raised the exterior plywood walls.
To weatherproof the box, they added a white metal roof to reflect the sun’s heat, and they built a floor that was layered, from the ground up, with a waterproof barrier, gravel, fill dirt and a rough coat of adobe plaster made from clay, sand and straw scraps. Later, the floor would be finished with a finer coat of adobe and sealed with natural oils and beeswax.
Once the structure was enclosed, the crew started baling.
Bristling blocks of straw, culled from wheat grown in Alamance County, were stacked like bricks on the concrete beam. The crew notched out the bales with chain saws to fit around the wall studs. They used grinders to cut channels for electrical cables.
To finish the interior walls, two coats of adobe plaster — one rough, one fine — were slathered directly onto the bales.
“You just glob it on with your hands and use a trowel to try to keep it level,” says Rachel, a gungho homeowner who had no formal training in “globbing” but rolled up her sleeves to work side-by-side with the building crew. She recruited friends, family and neighbors to help sift sand and clay, push wheelbarrows and smooth the plaster.
“It felt like what I would imagine an old-fashioned barn raising would be,” she says. “All of it was fun. Like, seriously hard labor, but fun and joyful.”
Friends bubbled with questions about the house.
Q: Do the straw bales pose a fire hazard?
A: No, according to Amanda, the straw is so tightly packed it would only smolder if exposed to a flame.
Q: What about the electrical wires embedded in the walls?
A: The wires are heavy duty, rated for underground use.
Q: Will rodents and other critters try to nest in straw?
A: Rodents can get into walls only where there’s a gap. The
straw bales are sealed all the way around.
Q: What about humidity in this climate?
Could the straw get moldy?
A: A vapor-permeable air barrier on the outside wall allows any water molecules to escape. On the inside, adobe plaster does the same, Amanda says. “Clay is an excellent humidity regulator.”
In keeping with Amanda’s tradition of naming her projects, Rachel, an avid birder, decided to call her home The Bower, after the resourceful bowerbird, which uses straw and grass to weave arched nests on the ground. Another, more literary, definition of bower is a lady’s private room, which describes Rachel’s refuge perfectly.
The home was finished in August 2025.
Rachel and Amanda advertised an open house on social media.
Old friends and new neighbors showed up.
“It helped us to be more a part of the community,” Rachel says.
Many people were surprised at how large The Bower felt inside. They talked about the abundant light, the attention to detail and the decorative flair.
Contrary to what they might have read about the flimsy straw home in The Three Little Pigs, The Bower felt solid and well-crafted — a custom-built reflection of Rachel’s artistic heart and commitment to honoring the natural world.
Maybe that’s because Amanda and Rachel literally wove the outdoors into the interior.
As soon as visitors step through the mango-yellow front door, they are greeted with a showstopper: a wall made with an old English method known as wattle-and-daub, in which plaster is stuck to woven branches.
In Rachel’s home, the wall stops about a foot shy of the ceiling, and some of the underlying lattice — which includes cuttings of bamboo, elderberry and ligustrum from around the city — is exposed at the top.
A fallen branch from a willow oak in the backyard anchors one end of the wall, jutting into a doorway to form a true art installment.
One of the crew members, a ceramicist, added more wow to the wall by sculpting an elm tree into the adobe plaster, a tribute to a living tree on the property.
The home’s organic eye candy gets even better.
From the wattle-and-daub wall, visitors’ eyes climb to a lofty, wraparound bookshelf nestled close to the cypress plank ceiling.
The cypress, which came from a discount lumber company, was harvested in Eastern North Carolina.
The bookshelf was made with old barn wood that Amanda found at Preservation Greensboro’s Architectural Salvage.
Closer to the ground, the home hums a medley of thrift finds, recycled building materials, meaningful objects from Rachel’s life and dabs of modernity.
Wooden chairs and rockers came from Rachel’s grandparents’ home and from Milltown 87 Antiques & Collectibles, a vintage warehouse in Burlington.
A drop-leaf table came from Red Collection.
Bob Beerman and his wife, Teresa Rasco, who founded Bass Violin Shop, where Rachel works in customer service and bookkeeping, gave her a richly-colored, wool rug.
Rachel’s own bass fiddle stands in the corner, a nod to the legacy of her mom, who last taught orchestra at Penn-Griffin School for the Arts in High Point. Rachel’s father taught English at the same school.
In another corner, a Raku-fired vase made by Rachel’s late friend, ceramicist Hiroshi Sueyoshi of Wilmington, occupies a display niche scooped out of the wall.
A few feet away — above a stylish microfiber sofa from Sabai, a women-owned business in High Point — curiosity snags on a book-sized stained-glass door built into the wall.
Rachel’s artist friend, Lindsay Mercer, designed the glass to depict a bowerbird. When visitors open the door, they look through a piece of glass into the field-grown essence of the home.
“It’s called a ‘truth window’ because you can see the straw bales in the walls,” says Amanda.
The kitchen is an ode to artful economy. The stained glass lamp hanging over the island also came from Milltown 87. The butcher-block countertops, made from American walnut, came from Floor & Decor. The mint-green backsplash tile was salvaged from another job of Amanda’s. She bought the unfinished cabinets online. The cabinets were finished with dark green linseed oil paint and hung on the home’s north wall, the only wall that’s not filled with straw bales.
Plumbing cannot be run in straw-bale walls in case of leaks. Amanda also needed the strength of studs behind the wall to hang cabinets. Still, she wanted the home’s north face to have an insulation value comparable to the straw walls, so she designed an 8-inch-thick double-studded wall with two rows of staggered two-by-fours.
She hung sheetrock on the interior and filled the gaps between inner and outer walls with blown-in cellulose insulation and sheep wool.
To sustain herself and the planet, Rachel picked energy-efficient appliances: an induction stove, a convection oven and downsized dishwasher. Even though her home steps lightly on the Earth, Rachel feels spoiled by it.
“Having a dishwasher is luxurious to me,” she says.
So is having a studio for her creative endeavors, which, lately have included drawing with chalk pastels. She also freelances as a singer and bass player, and as a graphic artist. Among her designs: the fox and grapes logo of Scuppernong, an independent book store where she used to work. Recently, she drew up signs to help Amanda market a total renovation that’s listed for sale in the historic Dunleath neighborhood.
Working in her studio, Rachel is often surrounded by meowing muses: two or four cats. She owns two fur babies and shares custody of two more with her parents. They — the cats — love to nap in her studio’s deep window sill, another bonus of straw-bale construction.
“These are great windows for cats,” says Rachel, who is both pro-cat and pro-bird. She has dotted her Anderson windows — Amanda uses only new windows in her construction — with stickers to keep the birds from slamming into the energy-efficient panes.
Off the the studio, a full bath is another study in economy and style.
A vessel sink sits atop a dry-sink cabinet that Rachel found at Milltown 87. The handsome navy and gold wallpaper — featuring, of course, bowerbirds — came from Spoonflower, a Durham-based custom printer of fabrics and wallpapers. The mirror came from Facebook Marketplace. Ditto the bronze-and-caramel colored floor tile. The floor is heated from underneath, another touch that feels like an indulgence to Rachel.
“The adobe floor can be pretty cool in the winter, so it’s nice to step into the bathroom and feel like, ‘Oh yes!’” she says.
The bedroom holds more beautifully practical flourishes: An arched inset in the wall functions as an adobe headboard for a queen mattress, which fits easily into the room, thanks to the recess. Wall sconces flank the arch.
The room has a laundry nook, too, meaning that, for the first time in her adult life, Rachel claims a washer and dryer of her own.
“This is a game changer,” she says, recalling experiences with basement laundry rooms and other tenants’ clothes left in washers and dryers.
Her new combination unit washes and dries clothes in the same tub. The ventless dryer dehumidifies clothes and drains away the water, which saves energy and extends the life of the clothes.
Thanks to many electricity-sipping decisions, the home earned a tax-saving Energy Star certification for Amanda. Rachel is eligible for electric company rebates.
Amanda throws out R-values, which are insulation ratings, to describe just how energy-efficient The Bower is. The higher the R-value, the better.
The Bower’s straw-bale walls are rated at R-30; codes for conventional homes call for R-15.
The attic, which is blanketed with blown-in cellulose insulation, is rated at R-49. The code for regular homes is R-38.
Already, The Bower is flexing its ability to save energy, therefore money. Rachel says the family’s power bill for November 2025 — her home is tied to her parents’ electrical system — was less for two homes than it was for just her parents’ home when she was living there in November 2024.
No solar panels power The Bower, but the home’s orientation, which squares with the Earth’s cardinal directions, makes the home a passive-solar structure.
Most of the windows face south. In the summer, the windows are sheltered by an overhang that provides shade. In the winter, when the sun’s arc is lower, its rays penetrate the windows and warm the interior walls.
The home’s exterior walls are Earth friendly in their own way.
Amanda’s crew used propane torches to scorch the spruce plank siding, then they painted the burned surface with warm linseed oil. The charring method, known as Sho Sugi Ban, is a traditional Japanese method of protecting wood from insects and fire.
The dark boards, coupled with The Bower’s white roof and yellow door, make for an eye-popping modernist home.
Rachel’s family and friends love it, inside and out. Her parents tease her about trading places.
Some of her friends say they’d love to build something similar.
Rachel says only a few of her friends are homeowners, and she never thought she’d have her own place, much less one that captures her artistic, financial and ethical values so well. Building a straw-bale home — for about the same cost as a conventional home of the same size — with access to a large garden space and her mother’s fresh-baked cookies and focaccia, feels like a dream come true.
“To have a home — I didn’t even know that was possible,” she says. “The first couple of months being here, I thought, ‘I don’t know if this is real. It feels too good.’”
