Natural Building, a video interview with Simon Dale

Inside Simon & Jasmines home at Lammas

Our friend Simon Dale is well known all over the world after the viral spread of photos of his original "hobbit house" across the web.   Pioneers at the awesome Lammas project in Wales, this short interview was filmed last summer at Simon and Jasmine's new home in Wales. Taking a couple of months and a few thousand Euro's to build the main frame of the house, one aspect we appreciate about this type of building is the integration of various aspects of Permaculture design into truly affordable and functional homes.

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Having built on a bunch of low cost natural buildings in various countries, and having lived low impact half my life, I totally share Simon's approach, put forward very eloquently in this interview.  Simon talks about how his approach differs greatly from the conventional green/ sustainable building industry which tends to focus on operational aspects of buildings and often overlooks the externalized health and safety concerns connected to industry/ oil capital in the creation of "ecological" products.  I've seen this again and again on my journeys too, "green" buildings utilizing fancy tech. & materials relying on mining & production systems out of sight and out of mind on another continent that do not necessarily get factored into the overall impact of the construction.

The beauty of the old building vernaculars around the world is that most people could participate in constructing appropriate homes with the materials around them, some basic skills and without getting into life long debt!  It is well worth reading up about the awesome work happening at Lammas, who through their determination throughout their planning battle (working closely with the Welsh assembly) managed to change the laws across Wales.  Epic.

Apologies if the background music is distracting, we realize the audio varies massively from computer to computer.  Sorry, there's nothing we can do about it now...