"But earth houses always look so... hippy..."

Before deciding that we wanted to build an earthbag house we did considerable research on this style of building, research that continues. Even now, every so often I find new things.

Whilst Kyle and his ex-painter/decorator eyes has always been more actively concerned with the appearance of our intended house than I have, we've both always loved the look typical of so many earthen houses.

We love the curves that are so restful to the eye, we love the abundance of greenery, and the colours that you couldn't quite get away with in a 'normal' house. I guess if we wanted 'normal' we wouldn't be doing this anyway, so it's unsurprising the different appearance is part of the attraction.

A little while ago I found the below collection from somewhere near Bogata in Columbia, all designed by the same architect.

I'd never seen earthbag houses with such clean, crisp lines or such bright colours. Very schnazzy.

And the light, bright interiors:

I'd always previously sort of assumed that the kind of people who build earthen homes would tend to be the kind of people who decorate them in loud and colourful ways, as we intend to do, simply because we like it. When I saw these pictures it seemed fair all of a sudden, having never considered it before, that some people would want the earthen house but a more conventional interior appearance.

Sometimes when our project comes up in conversation people ask what it will look like, and I show them random offerings from my Pinterest collection. Upon showing these to a friend she seemed amazed - apparently it had never occurred to her that it was possible to decorate an earthen house with crisp lines and white walls and a marbled benchtop in the kitchen. For some reason it had seemed to her that it simply wasn't allowed, through some weird nuance of the laws of physics, to decorate them in any other way than the slightly 'hippy' images I had favoured before.