Design and Consultancy Services
amazonails is the UK's leading strawbale design company in the UK.
We have been involved in the design and construction of over 200 buildings, including the largest in the UK (11,000 sq ft), the Grand Designs Eco-home of the Year 2008, and outstanding buildings like the National Trust 'Footprint' at Windermere. Recently the first local authority to build low cost social housing with strawbales (N Kesteven, Lincolnshire) was announced.
We are going to help you to build and design your dreamhome or workplace.
How?
Using strawbales
Everybody can use strawbales to build their dream home: one that will never need to be heated nor cooled in order to provide a cosy and beautiful space; so natural, that its production could make a huge positive affect on it’s surrounding environment .
Our design team supports you or your clients all the way through planning permission to construction drawings. Our experience will help you have a healthy, energy efficient building to live and work in.
See what a typical project might involve.
The services you can request from amazonails
It was Barbara Jones who introduced strawbale construction in the UK 12 years ago and since then amazonails had been steadily refining strawbale building design with a special focus on:
- reducing energy embodied in construction to absolute minimum
- extending thermal insulating qualities of homes to their limits
- creating fun and friendly approach to building
- creating beautiful natural homes tailored to its owners needs
- Reducing energy embodied in construction to absolute minimum
There is approximately 35kg of CO2 stored in one 16kg of strawbales*. Assuming that 3 bedroom family home can be built with approximately 350 bales, the whole building can store in its fabric about 12.25 tonnes of CO2. Additional use of any processed material in the construction will offset this great potential of local straw and that is why amazonails are concerned about their choice of materials throughout the building.
Over the years of persistently aiming at building with locally sourced natural materials, amazonails have developed building designs using local straw, locally coppiced wood, local clay and stone.
The traditional use of lime helps to make amazonails buildings last for centuries, even in the UK climate.
amazonails are the only building professionals in Europe who specialize in the reduction of timber by using straw as a loadbearing material.
amazonails are famous for not using cement in their natural buildings.
A standard amazonails strawbale building has the advantages of being an extremely well insulated building with all advantages of building with high thermal mass, providing a warm, healthy and stable indoors environment, with a very small energy input.
Creating beautiful natural homes tailored to its owners needs
In all cases, the key to a durable and energy efficient strawbale building lies in good design, a sound understanding of the principles of strawbale building, quality work and attention to detail throughout the building process, and adequate and appropriate maintenance throughout the life of the building.
A typical project:
Our involvement in each project is as much or as little as you require.
Our design input may mean simply checking over plans produced by you or by an architect/draughtsperson, or it could mean providing full plans for planning permission and full construction drawings for building and building control purposes.
• You don't need an architect, you can start by sharing your ideas and sketches with amazonails, and we can do all the design work and construction drawings for you, including all relevant information for building regulations and ordering of materials.
• It could include us working with your draughtsperson or architect at the design stage, and producing detailed construction drawings with them.
• We would then be available by phone or email for on-the-spot advice if required by the carpenters and builders involved in the preparations for building.
• We would be on site to train volunteers, course participants, or a local firm in strawbale building techniques, and to oversee quality control as the straw bale walls went up.
This training could include carpentry, foundations, roofing, if required and if appropriate.
• The rest of the building, including roofing, plumbing, electrics and carpentry would typically be carried out either by a local firm, or self-builders, or a combination of both. Again, we would expect to train them in relevant details in order for the building to be a success and we would be available for help and advice if needed during the rest of the build.
• Plastering of the walls could be done either as a volunteer training project in a similar fashion to the strawbale walls, or could be undertaken by professional lime plasterers.
Your concept is then developed into computer drawings and renderings giving more realistic pictures. Upon your final approval of the design amazonails will then guide you through the planning and building regulation approval. Once the building has been fully approved amazonails will start working on detailed construction drawings from which you and/or your contractor could then build the house
Once your new home is designed, you can continue with support from amazonails and our fun and friendly approach to building
Our aim is to provide a good service for everyone, to encourage you to do things yourself and particularly to encourage people that wouldn't be normally on building sites to be involved in the building process - as we all used to be in the past. In previous generations we would all help to do a barn raising or to build houses.
The element of mutual help in construction of houses is missing in our contemporary culture. To have particularly that source of participation, we would all have the different feeling about an environment that we inhibit today. Find out more about our values and principle
For design and construction drawings we will give you a quote once we have more details of your project, call or email us to discuss it.
The range of services include:
- Fully Illustrated lectures, talks and workshops are available —slides/powerpoint presentations and demonstration builds for your group, institution or event.
- Design advice and consultancy offered;
- Full construction drawings;
- Site visits and on-site supervision and training given.
- Plus on-site courses and training.
- If you need additional or specific advice, you can contact us on a consultancy basis, for which there is a charge per hour of £60
In some cases, discounts may be possible for unfunded groups, or people with a low income.
Please feel free to contact us if you want to discuss your project with us.
