Last year, OGN reported that Yvon Chouinard, the owner of multi-billion dollar clothing firm Patagonia, had given his company away to help fight climate change. “Earth is now our only shareholder,” announced Chouinard, who began the now $3bn company in 1973, and expects Earth to receive roughly $100m every year to protect nature and biodiversity. It was a remarkable gesture of corporate responsibility.
Now, aged 84, Yvon Chouinard is turning his attention to sustainable construction. Architect Dylan Johnson recalls “Yvon said, ‘I have this piece of land in the suburbs of Ventura. It would be great to see if we could create a better version of the suburban California home.’”
And so, that’s what they did.
The result is detailed in a short film Patagonia released earlier this month called Home, Grown. It shows the building a straw bale home on Chouinard’s plot in a middle-class, suburban Ventura neighborhood. A centuries-old building practice, straw bale construction involves using straw leftover from wheat, rice, or barley crops as the main structural element or insulation in a building. The practice leverages locally sourced materials, is inexpensive, super-approachable, and has the ability to capture a sizable amount of carbon emissions from the environment.
It falls in line with the company’s commitment to protecting the earth, and the film stands as a way to spread the gospel of a green build and what could be as we think a little more deeply about waste and construction. “There’s an enormous amount of money to be made with waste,” Chouinard says in the opening scene of the film. “…The time is now to reimagine, not just housing, but everything else.” Here's the short film...