Bristol Green House

Video studio
Event space
Rehearsal studio
Filming location

Visit the studio website

Bristol Green House

Stop Global Warming
Learn Green Building

This website documents the building of Rik Lander's studio/workshop in inner city Bristol using eco-practices. The over-riding principle has been to bring as little in and take as little away as possible.

• blog
• plans
• links
• home

email: riklander(at)
magic-tree(dot)com

• Foundations
• Tyre walls
• Straw bale walls
• I-beam roof
• Living roof
• Clay/Lime render
• Hempcrete
• Insulation
• Earthbags

• Book the space

Last year I ran some volunteer weekends to apply hempcrete to the interior tyre walls. They look absolutely stunning. Usually hempcrete walls are built using shuttering, so this is a very unique way of working with this highly insulating material. Send me an email if you are interested in helping out.

Volunteers needed in spring 2012

The Story So Far...

The purpose of this website is to share information about the fantastic alternative building techniques I've been using. As a novice builder I have spent many hours researching every choice to weigh up the relative ecological merits of each option. Then I have gone ahead and put my choices into action. Needless to say, as a naive self-builder, I didn't always make the right choice.

The information on this site is not intended to offer the definitive answers to your questions about how to build green, instead I offer some interesting methods and my own experiences and observations. Most useful are my mistakes, because you can learn from them, as I did, but without the pain.

I'm aware that there's a lot of contradictory and uninformed comment all over the web. You will have to decide for yourself just how useful my contribution is.

For the step by step story of the build, read the Blog

The construction techniques used by Rik Lander demonstrate the principles of re-use, recycling and low embodied energy. They are not necessarily practical methods for the building industry, but we have shown they are possible for first-time self builders. This building has a VERY low embodied energy and proves that the human urge to build need not be environmentally destructive.

Over the summers of 2007-9 we have run courses on many aspects of green building and worked with Amazon Nails and Brighton's Low Carbon Network, builders of the Brighton Earthship. The project is concluding now in the summer of 2009.

The purpose of running the courses was to demystify the building process so that ordinary people can build in sustainable ways. Volunteering is essentially an exchange of labour for knowledge.

Courses:

Clay rendering.
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Living roof construction.
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Straw Bale problem solving and clay work course.
With Barbara Jones.

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Straw loose-fill insulation.
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Gabion foundations.
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Car tyre retaining walls.
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I-beam roof construction.
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Straw bale wall construction.
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Dates: Closed

Get in contact to express an interest and we'll keep you informed of progress.