Homes that make more energy than they live on

GOLDSTRAW Straw · Solar · Storage
EN RO ΕΛ IT
A compressed-straw home with a timber frame set against wooded hills Hillside Home · Custom Homes

The house that makes more energy than it lives on

View the build A striking gable straw-panel home set in the hills The Gable House · Custom Homes

Straw that follows the roofline all the way up

View the build A finished compressed-straw home Courtyard House · Custom Homes

Finished, and indistinguishable from any other house

View the build Straw panels being fitted over an existing masonry house Masonry Retrofit · Renovations + Additions

An old house, brought up to a standard it could never reach inside

View the build A timber frame being raised on site Weathertight Shell · Special Projects

A shell in days, not months

View the build A finished, light-filled straw-panel interior Garden Studio · Special Projects

One room, built to the same wall as the house

View the build Straw wall panels with diagonal timber bracing Visitor Pavilion · Commercial

Two hours of fire resistance, on paper

View the build

Togo & Alpha

They arrived from Alaska already wearing the answer.

Togo is the larger, darker male; Alpha the lighter female. They are Alaskan Malamutes — animals engineered by a few thousand years of Arctic winter — and they spend their summers in Greek Macedonia. That sounds like a mistake until you understand how their coat actually works. It is the same principle we build walls out of.

Two Alaskan Malamutes in a timber workshop easing a compressed straw panel upright
One — the panel Straw compressed into a structural board, in the workshop.
The two Malamutes raising straw wall panels on a concrete slab in a spring orchard
Two — the walls Panels going up on the slab, in an orchard in spring.
The two Malamutes applying lime render over the straw walls of the finished house
Three — the render Lime going on over the mesh, and the house is closed.

“We finally have the house of our dreams. Now we are enjoying life.”

Togo reading on a lounger under the pergola of the finished straw house, Alpha beside him and puppies playing on the grass
Four — the house, finished and lived in. Rendered straw walls, a deep pergola for the August sun, and the next generation on the grass.

Togo and Alpha are real dogs. The build sequence above is illustration, not a delivered project — our actual completed work is in the portfolio.

Why a Malamute never gets shaved in summer.

A Malamute does not survive +40 °C because its coat is thick. It survives because the coat is dense. A woolly undercoat holds a layer of still air against the skin, and coarse guard hairs above it stop that air being carried away. Still air is a poor conductor of heat — that is the entire trick.

Which is why shaving one in summer harms it. The same trapped air that keeps the cold out keeps the heat out. The coat is not a heater and not a coolant; it is a barrier, and it works in both directions at once.

A straw panel does the same thing at building scale.

Straw is hollow-stemmed and fibrous. Compressed under heat and pressure it becomes a dense board holding millions of small pockets of still air, bound by the straw's own resins with no added glue — a Swedish process first patented in 1935.

So one wall construction answers both a Macedonian January and a Macedonian August, for exactly the reason the coat does, and without a machine running to maintain it. Our declared figures: [U-value W/m²K] and [decrement delay, hours].

Two dogs bred for the Arctic came a long way to find a house built the way they are. They found it in Sosandra.

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Tell us your plot. We'll tell you what it costs.

A written specification and an honest number — no pressure, no jargon.

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