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Bibi van der Zee spends a night in the Groundhouse in Brittany, and is pleasantly surprised by the pleasures of living off-grid What on Earth am I doing in the middle of France, in the dark, in an earthship? After a four-hour drive from Caen port, getting lost and intimidated by speedy French motorists and battling through the rain I am finally letting myself into the Groundhouse. Tired, bowlegged and with aching shoulders I am faced with rough-finished walls, no TV, and a composting toilet. A wave of homesickness breaks over me. The Groundhouse is a second or even third generation earthship built in Brittany, in France. The original earthships – sustainable homes made from recycled materials – were built in New Mexico by architect Michael Reynolds. Set into the red soil of the New Mexico desert, with their sloping greenhouse fronts, turret roofs, and bulging adobe walls, the originals look like the settlements in Star Wars. The one I am visiting in Brittany, owned by Daren Howarth and Adrianna Nortje, doesn't look quite as startling but has the same purpose: to live as lightly as possible on the land. In the 1970s Reynolds, having collected his architecture qualification from Cincinnati University, had concluded that "architecture has nothing to do with the planet and barely anything to do with people, it is worthless" and turned to building houses that were off-grid, using recycled materials such as tyres rammed full of earth, bottles and tin cans. The greenhouse areas captured the sun, with the sloping glass tilted precisely to take advantage of the fact that in summer the sun is high, and in winter it is lower and so penetrates further into the house just as you need the extra warmth. All the houses have solar water panels, rainwater collection systems and reedbed sewages. They are relatively cheap to build, have vegetable gardens, bird tables and compost bins. After a wonderful night's sleep, I wake up to sun pouring in through the front of the Groundhouse. The last time I visited an earthship – the Low Carbon Trust one in Brighton and Howarth's first such project – it seemed dark and slightly depressing. But now Howarth has done away with the greenhouse frontage and simply faced the house south, with only the bathroom and boiler room on the back walls, so all the other rooms pick up every available drop of sunlight. Despite having no heating on during the night, the house is pleasantly warm. In their book, Howarth and Nortje kept track of the Groundhouse temperature for a year and, with no heating beyond the wood-burning stoves, it was between 18.7C in winter and 22C in summer. The house is also carbon neutral, which is interesting because the UK's coalition government is keeping the target of all newbuild homes having a zero carbon footprint by 2016. Might earthships be an answer? Green architect Pat Borer, who is just finishing the Centre for Alternative Technologies' beautiful Welsh Institute for Sustainable Education, says they can be wonderful "from a libertarian, anarchist view of the world, but are Wimpey or Barretts going to go into earthships?" He thinks they may be a "bit of a red herring". Howarth, disagrees. For family reasons he has been forced to move back to the UK, leaving the Groundhouse to be rented out to holidaymakers and friends, and now he is driven mad, he says, by the wastefulness of the traditional terraced house he's living in. "I would love to be able to get out of the city, find a patch of land, and build myself another groundhouse," he says.
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Just imagine taking your sick son or daughter to the hospital after dark and having the doctor examine the child by candlelight. Or walking 10 miles to the hospital for treatment after being bitten by a rabid dog and discovering that the vaccination you need is located an additional 100 miles away in a facility that can stock it because it has refrigerators.
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