For years, I watched the party from afar.
A movement has long flowered in California around green building. Living in Berkeley, I heard its excited rumblings like distant music. In the Bay Area, all things green, however humble, draw wide smiles from passersby. Astonishing environmentally minded houses were sprouting like fresh shoots. As the founder of a small archaeological nonprofit startup, I knew little about construction, but still I sensed these structures were wrestling old ideas to the ground. They were inventing. They demanded to be seen.
Then I happened to move next door to two of the people responsible for the buildings I had been admiring. Architects and builders Cate Leger and Karl Wanaselja leaven their serious commitment to sustainability with a streak of infectious play. Around town, they are known for their designs that turn junked Porsche doors into gleaming walls of metal scales, repurpose Volvo windshields as rain canopies, and clad houses in mosaics of street signs or bark unrolled from trees, moss intact.
Green buildings invite dreaming, and I began to dream of straw.
Following California’s material tradition of adobe, builders like Cate and Karl have created houses of rammed earth, hempcrete, modern adobe, and straw bale. I admired straw-bale houses for their thick walls, smooth curves, and quiet dignity. Their construction is simple: Stack the bales, then encase them in lath and plaster, adding a stick frame if required for earthquakes. Building with straw seemed approachable, even disarming.
Years passed while I grew the idea of a straw-bale cabin 450 miles from Berkeley in the vast Mojave wilderness. I already knew Janet Johnson’s marvelous straw-bale houses near Joshua Tree — especially Harrison House, whose flying buttresses recall Mission San Juan Bautista. I was a neophyte but trusted that straw bale would breathe through the stifling summer monsoon season and its thermal mass would insulate the home against dramatic swings of heat and cold.
The open-plan interior.
When COVID gripped California in the spring of 2020, my four-year project began. Much of the work I did alone, living on site through the climate extremes of Yucca Mesa.
Karl and Cate provided drawings and often visited to study the sun, moon, and wind with me. Janet Johnson cheered me through long days and late nights as bobcats and mountain lions prowled the site for food. San Francisco architect Zach Stewart shared the “owner-builder way” he had carved from California’s building code in the 1960s, his hard work making room for experiments. Ron Perrine, a seasoned builder, guided me from the start and later set me up to work solo.
We built the cabin I call Mesa Sky Disk on a lush plain overlooking more than 100 acres of open land dotted with Joshua trees, Spanish dagger, chollas, jojoba, creosote, and blackbrush. We sculpted the building around the vegetation and dug most everything by hand, refusing to move a single plant.
The cabin’s two wings form overlapping ellipses, which we plotted by dragging a stick tethered to stakes at the foci. Straw-bale walls trace those curves, 22 inches thick pinned with long bamboo shoots and layers of elk fence. A natural lime skin hardened around the straw. A metal roof carries the two intersecting ellipses into the air, completing their butterfly shape. The curving petals pitch upward while, below, a low-carbon stem wall entombs toxic landfill — old materials gathered from a junkyard outside Palm Springs to remove them from landfill.
Mesa Sky Disk now welcomes guests as a rental but stands, more importantly, as an active laboratory for California’s climate future. The project confronts competing needs: reducing carbon and toxic materials while creating a livable space; pursuing genuinely new ideas while remaining practical; and meeting California’s stringent seismic and energy-efficiency codes while building an affordable, and even beautiful, retreat in the wild desert.
