Mark and Cathy Dearricott have been fascinated by and working in sustainable building and community development for most of the past fifteen years. As a young man (in his early twenties) with a young family and a passion for building, Mark started working with renowned central Vic earth builder Michael Archbold, building beautiful and eco-friendly homes from stone and mud-brick, which led to some years of self employment in the same area broken by an 18 month period with goldfields re-vegetation in Mandurang in seed collecting and re-vegetation of indigenous plants in Central Victoria.

Cathy has spent the majority of this time raising our beautiful family, studying and working in youth outreach in the Bendigo region and supporting Mark in his passion and dedication to develop sustainable methods of domestic and commercial building.

Conservation, ecology, social responsibility and sustainability have been on the top of their list of priorities and interests.

Over the past seven years (2000 – 2007) Mark has been the principle tradesperson in the development of Vic’s foremost strawbale construction sub-contracting business, stacking and rendering strawbale from Foster to Horsham, from Phillip Island to Moama and many points in between, with well into the hundreds of happy customers.

With the limitations of partnerships being what they are, the time came for Mark and Cathy to grasp the nettle and develop their own business (on a client-focused, open and professional basis.)

A major part of their motivation is making a fantastic building material like strawbale work in a systematic, predictable, practical way, so that it doesn’t fade into obscurity as mud-brick is doing, but evolves into a common, popular, eco-friendly building material with which everybody in the building industry can work.

Giving information about the strawbale building process freely and honestly, should mean that anyone who wants to build an eco-friendly and beautiful building can do so without fear of the unknown. Any tradespeople they employ to work on their project can find the information that they need to perform their job as easily as it can be done on any other project in the mainstream building industry.

If you need information on how to build in strawbale and make your project a no-compromise success, feel free to contact us and have a chat, or check the blog to see how we resolve the various building issues we encounter.