The morning mist hangs low over Ianto Evans’s and Linda Smiley’s cob cottage retreat in the rolling countryside of Cottage Grove, Oregon. A fire crackles in the outdoor fireplace; another warms the bread oven. Ianto and I sit on a cob bench facing the garden, a bountiful plot rich with kohlrabi, leeks, parsnips, rutabaga, broccoli, and fava beans, all frost-hearty vegetables that keep the cob cottage residents in fresh produce year-round. There are flowers bursting with bright colors; purple snails; yellowjackets; bright-winged butterflies; and a handful of Steller’s jays, one of which has appointed itself Ianto’s personal alarm clock and hiking companion. And all around us, cob structures—a cottage, a greenhouse, an oven, a fireplace—are tucked behind a rambling cob wall.

“How much does it cost to build a cob cottage?” I ask.

“How long is a piece of string?” Ianto counters.

We share a laugh as I realize that if I am to understand life behind these cob walls, I’ll need to abandon my usual way of thinking.

Building of necessity

It has been twelve years since Ianto, born in Liverpool and trained as an architect, and Linda, a native Californian and recreation therapist, built their first cob structure, an experiment that grew both out of need and curiosity. That first venture was an L-shaped addition to a wood cabin.

“It attracted a lot of attention,” Ianto recalls. “We didn’t set out to attract attention; we set out to create housing for ourselves because we had no place to live.”

But four years later, with the cob addition still standing—and, Linda says, “giving us a lot of joy”—the pair decided it was time to share what they had learned about the natural construction. Ianto expected the usual “back to the land” sort of folks who had always shown an interest in his natural building experiments to attend his first cob workshop, and he wasn’t disappointed. What he hadn’t counted on were the others.

“As soon as we started doing this stuff, it was a whole different thing. Middle-class people with blue rinses would show up totally enthusiastic about this stuff. It astonished us,” Ianto says. “Here we are, eight years into this project, and we’ve had, for instance, four people from England, one from Thailand, one from Korea, a wildlife rehabilitator from Manhattan, a real estate lady from Georgia, and a South American multimillionaire who has his own jet. These are people taking workshops on how to build a mud house. Is this strange or what?”

With cob you maximize your own skill and time and minimize the money you put in.