Heather Bathon and Michael Furbish live in a house of straw. A house so solid, sun-washed, and welcoming that silly thoughts about huffing and puffing wolves and chubby little pigs disappear the minute you see it.

Instead, what comes to mind is the French countryside. Provence perhaps. “‘It’s like something from a painting,’ one of our friends told me, and I really liked that,” says Bathon.

Located near exclusive Gibson Island on five waterfront acres bordering Cornfield Creek, the house is considered a “green” or “sustainable” design because it uses materials grown and harvested locally. Plus, it consumes less energy than the average dwelling. The 2,200-square foot, two-story home has a poplar post-and-beam framework insulated with 850 straw bales pinned in place by locally grown bamboo poles and thickly coated with gray-white lime plaster. You can’t see or smell the straw—you’d never know it’s there.

Bathon and Furbish are so used to answering questions about “hay in their walls” that, before you even ask, they’re likely to explain that the straw, a byproduct of wheat harvesting, isn’t the same as hay, a livestock feed cut from field grasses. Straw bales do not attract bugs or mice because they contain no nutrients and are flame retardant because the bales’ dense packing keeps out oxygen. They also offer great soundproofing and roughly twice the insulation of a standard six-inch wall filled with fiberglass.

Earlier in their marriage the couple lived in a traditional Baltimore rowhouse. “We enjoyed the city, but I was getting into gardening and wanted more green around me,” Bathon explains. “We took a Sunday drive, saw a ‘for sale’ sign, turned into the driveway of the property, and I said, ‘This is it.’”

They hoped to salvage the old summer cottage there, but it needed too much work so they razed it and started over. In the meantime, Furbish was becoming enamored with the concept of environmentally responsible building. “He read The Straw Bale House from cover to cover,” Bathon remembers, “and said, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’” Published in 1994, the book’s authors include Athena and Bill Steen, who live and teach in a forty-acre straw bale community in Arizona. To procure the necessary permits, Bathon and Furbish brought in experts to convince the county that straw bale construction— new to Anne Arundel County— is safe and viable. Although used in the United States for at least a hundred years, the approach is most often found in prairie states like Nebraska.

The house, completed in 2000, features one open room on the main level with a ten-and-a-half-foot-high ceiling, a spacious kitchen at one end, and a fireplace topped by a curbstone mantle at the other. The orange, yellow, and pink striped painting above the mantle was created on Plexiglass by occasional artist Bathon. Deep recesses in the windows and doors, due to the eighteen-inch thickness of the straw bales, complement the high ceiling. Six glass doors open off the southern wall onto a stone terrace; from here, patches of the creek peek through clumps of trees that help keep the house cool. A natural ochre pigment washes all the downstairs walls in a warm butter color. Thick wooden beams hang above the gray cement floor, which is impervious to the claws of their dog, Daisy, and cats Coolio and Striker Louise, not to mention the spilled milk of their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Georgia. Upstairs are three modest bedrooms with tall windows under a canopy of trees—great for bird watching, Bathon says.

Bathon, who is drawn to intense colors as a result of a childhood spent in the vibrant cultures of Brazil and India, took the lead in decorating the home, choosing an eclectic mix of overstuffed armchairs and a Victorian couch, which she covered in orange and cream fabric with stripes and geometric patterns.

She prefers wood furniture handed down from her family and inexpensive finds from consignment stores. A six-foot-long green buffet made in Indonesia of reclaimed wood separates the living room area from the kitchen, which features a used stainless-steel commercial stove found through an ad in the Penny Saver. From a high school undergoing renovation they bought old science lab counters of a manmade material resembling black soapstone, which Furbish fashioned into windowsills and countertops. “I like things with character and age,” Bathon says, “things that have had a previous life. Why buy new stuff when so much that already exists goes unused?”

“I like a sort of frumpy, cozy existence, with animals walking in and out of the house and friends stopping by without worrying about putting their feet on the furniture,” she adds. “A lot of my friends are artists, and we like to be able to tear up a room, make something, and then put the room back together.”

No-fuss beauty, comfort, and a touch of the unusual are important to Bathon, a forty-two-year-old psychiatric nurse at Johns Hopkins who, in season, runs a small flower-and herb-cutting garden business dubbed Cut and Run on the property. She also sells vinyl floor cloths that she paints in colorful stripes and patterns. Furbish, forty-five, an industrial engineer by training and currently an environmental builder, loves the way the house looks and feels, but he’s especially taken with its efficient use of water and energy. He’s the one who steered them toward the two composting toilets that, surprisingly, give no hint of odor and look like polished wooden boxes. Waste drops into a cylinder in the basement and is transformed cleanly into a rich mud. 

Unlike some who embrace “alternative” housing, the couple is not willing to sacrifice modern comforts. “We live in the real world, have air conditioning and all the conveniences. I love cable TV,” Bathon says. Radiant floor heat, in which warm water circulates through coils under the floor, keeps the house toasty and reduces energy costs.

In the bathrooms, Bathon gave her artsy side free reign. The downstairs powder room features a mosaic of mirror fragments and green tile, wrought iron, a faux malachite ceiling, and a teardrop chandelier. The two upstairs baths are tiled with pieces of broken dishes. Clerks at flea markets where she bought the multicolored plates wrapped each carefully, ignoring her protests that she planned to smash them.

Outside, the front porch is covered by a “living roof” of hardy succulent plants and sod over a rubber membrane. The roof not only cools the house but absorbs storm run-off and reduces air pollution. A few feet away, their peacock, Pretty Boy, and twenty chickens wander around an old shed converted to a henhouse. Bathon and her daughter collect fresh eggs daily from the chickens, which she ordered through a catalog—selecting large, stately breeds like Speckled Sussex and Andalusian. Reaching across the front lawn is a vast rectangular garden fragrant with herbs and splashed from spring through fall with blooms: marigolds, blue hyssop, coneflowers. Cutting-garden customers, who can fill a mason jar for $7.50, are partial to the zinnias, dahlias, and cosmos as well as the basil, mint, and lavender.

After all was completed, Furbish was pleased to come in close to their original budget—spending more than for a mass-produced house but less than for custom building. The experience inspired him to use his engineering degree at Georgia Tech and Harvard M.B.A. to launch his own sustainable building firm, The Furbish Company. “We are trying to accentuate that these kinds of communities are not alternative and different, but normal and better—sort of like the history of natural food stores,” Furbish explains. “Despite their great products, many people were put off by the idea of ‘health food’—and look at the popularity of stores like Whole Foods.”

Adds Bathon, “Some people toy with the idea of responsible building but are afraid of living in something really weird. We’ve learned that you can have a house that significantly reduces your impact on the environment yet fits into any suburb in America. Coming home to this house is a big deal to me.”

Vicki Meade is a freelance writer living in Annapolis, Md.