Hey there, welcome to my channel where I take you on tours
of unique homes, and showcase stories of people living alternatively.
In today's video, we're traveling all the way to Norway
to take a tour of one family's Cob home,
that is located inside of a dome shaped greenhouse.
And we're gonna meet the family who designed and built
this home from scratch, using only
reclaimed and natural materials.
I'm pretty sure that this home is gonna
make you re-think everything you thought a home should be.
And if you like these videos, make sure to subscribe
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single time we publish a new tour.
Hi, welcome to our nature house.
Come inside!
So a nature house, is a house inside a greenhouse
with a water recycling system.
When we use water inside the house,
all of that water will go down in the basement,
into tanks, and it will be broken down,
and be pumped out to the trees, and the
tomatoes. So we get food from the trees,
and the trees get the nutrients they need from us.
Hi, we are Benjamin and Ingrid.
We have four children.
They are aged seventeen,
fifteen, twelve, and six.
And we also have four animals.
Two dogs, and two cats.
Where the house is located, it's right on the beach,
so we have a nice view and we can just
run down to the beach and have a swim.
Yes, I like that too. A lot.
We moved in here nine years ago,
after we designed it and built it ourselves.
We lived in a "normal" house before,
which we rented.
Then we wanted to have our own house, and we
decided to build because it was very hard to
buy a house here on the island.
Since we are very interested in organic lifestyle
and care very much about the environment,
and wanted to grow food,
we decided to build a nature house.
We didn't have any real construction experience
so I went to Denmark for a few days,
to a Cob workshop, to learn how to build with clay.
It's made by hand. It's sand, clay, and straw.
Which is mixed together by feet. You stomp in it,
dance around, and make clay bread.
So you can build with almost, like soft bricks.
It took one and a half years from start
until we moved in.
It costs a little over three million Norwegian Kroners.
The dome was about one million.
The dome is also the most expensive part of the house.
But it shelters the house from
the wind and rain, so we don't ever have to do anything
about the outside of the house because
it doesn't get exposed to weather.
It was quite cheap because we
built it ourselves, and because we
used clay, and straw, and sand.
This is the dome. It's our greenhouse surrounding the house.
People think it's very humid in here, but it's not.
It's actually a dry greenhouse.
We have vents on top of the dome
that open up. We have these pipes
buried under ground, two or three meters down,
and they are 45 meters long and there are two of them,
and they come into the greenhouse.
They take air, from down by the sea,
and the air is cooled down underground.
So when it comes in to the greenhouse in the summer,
we get this cool air in.
And it will be sucked around, like this, and up and out.
In the winter, when it's cold outside,
the temperature underground is a bit warmer
than outside, we get heated air, into the dome.
These trees, the branches, they grow very fast.
The ground here is very dense with nutrients.
Especially in the spring, it just explodes.
It happens very fast.
This home has changed our lifestyle
because of the plants, the trees, all the work.
We have to do a lot of gardening.
We have to do a lot of pruning, especially with the grapes.
I think they grow a meter every week.
At least.
We have to do a lot of pruning. All summer.
When the fruit is ready, like right now the apples,
some of the apples are ready, and the plums.
The cherries too. So we have to put
everything else aside and harvest the fruit when it's ready.
Winter is a time when we can rest and have a pause.
There's no growing here during the winter.
We live north of the Arctic Circle,
so we don't have sunlight for three months.
So this is the hall.
Here we have a staircase,
going up to the children's rooms.
And this is the second floor.
This is where our three boys live.
We also have the terrace on the second floor.
So this is the bathroom.
In here we have used leftover tiles on the floor
from I think five different homes, that had
some leftover tiles lying around.
And we also have stones on the floor from the beach.
We have Cob walls, like in the rest of the house.
Which are great for bathrooms, because they absorb
the moisture very well.
Actually, in the bathroom, a lot of people say,
"What is it with this bathroom that smells so good in here?"
And, you know, it's a place where we poop...
but, people say it smells good in that bathroom.
They don't know exactly what it is. I think it's the clay walls,
because of the moisture in there.
So we get this clay smell all the time.
The wet stones, like on this shelf,
and behind the sink and the bathtub,
and also inside the shower, we have
Tadelakt, which is a stone polished
lime plaster that can breathe,
but it's waterproof.
And this is the shower!
Downstairs we have the basement with the water system.
Here we have the living room.
The walls in the house are Cob walls,
which is a mixture of clay, sand, and straw.
As you can see, the walls are very thick. Massive.
When living inside a greenhouse that's a good idea.
The house won't get too hot
when it's sunny outside because of these thick, massive walls
that will store the cold from the night,
and during the day they will heat up, and store the heat
during the night, so we get this constant
nice temperature.
So this part of the house is the only part that's
coming out of the dome, it's not inside
the greenhouse, this little square here.
It's also the only part not made of Cob or straw,
it's made of wood. And this is pallets-
Old pallets that we collected.
It's also my yoga space, where I like to roll out my yoga mat.
The floor is also Cob,
just like the walls. This one is treated
on top with linseed oil and beeswax.
It's waterproof. We can spill water on it, and wash it.
Inside we have water-bourne heat.
which is heated by the wood stove
in the winter, and by solar collectors in the summer.
If we don't have sun, and we don't use the fireplace,
then the electricity will kick in, and take over.
Here we have our dining area.
This table, my husband Benjamin, he made it.
He actually made pretty much all our furniture. It's
made of driftwood, and the chairs are secondhand.
And he also made this chandelier, from driftwood.
The kitchen is made from leftover wood.
My husband, he built it to fit into this
very organic shaped room.
It wasn't very easy because we don't have any straight walls,
no corners, it's just round shapes,
but he managed to do it. This is actually my
favorite room, and I spend a lot of time here,
because I love cooking.
Thanks for watching this week's video, please make sure to like,
share, and subscribe, and I will see you soon
with another unique home tour.