What sparked your interest in green building?

I grew up in a family of builders/designers, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As a young child, my grandfather, a master cabinetmaker, taught me the fine art of woodworking. I learned construction from my father at an early age and have watched my mother design and decorate all my life. I have been part of the dozens of custom homes the two of them built together, individually and with their new spouses. From my mother, I learned to design for aesthetic effect and from my father got a great sense of frugality, and economy of materials and labor.

I graduated from the University of Colorado with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, and an emphasis in Marketing, in 1984. While in school, I got into the modeling and acting world and was able to travel the world and work. I love architecture and was happy to study homes and building techniques around the world. In the mid-'80s, I began to build and remodel my own houses, while working as an actor. Had I been a better actor I would not have had time to build and design homes, but as fortune would have it, I was able to do both fairly successfully.

Learning from my years of building conventionally, I quickly grew to dislike the waste of natural resources and the amount of toxic materials used in traditional building methods. Friends would make fun of me for finding old cabinetry, doors, windows and fixtures for my homes, but I couldn’t stand to use new, particle boarded products that were of lesser quality and less healthy.

Then, in 1994, I ventured to Bali, Indonesia where I was introduced to bamboo. I returned a year later to attend the 4th International Bamboo Conference. Suspecting that this material could be a saving grace for the planet, I studied and designed homes I would like to build with bamboo. But I knew that getting a bamboo house permitted in California would be next to impossible in the near future, so I researched materials related to bamboo that could be an acceptable alternative material. Straw bales were what I had been looking for.

A year of designing and 18 months of building later, my dreams were realized in the state-of-the-art, straw bale home where my family now lives.