An ancient technique saves an old carriage house

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“Seven shovelfuls of sand, a bucket of clay, and then that much water, depending on how much it rained,” remembers Shannon Kyles, a retired architectural history teacher and author of OntarioArchitecture.com. “This much straw –”

“Yeah, it fit in that cat litter box,” adds log contractor Bill Beaton helpfully.

“ – half a trowel of lime and half a trowel of Portland [cement],” she finishes.

Since Ms. Kyles took over construction of her cob-walled building from Mr. Beaton and his partner, Gene Power, last summer, she would know. But this author wonders, what if one mixed up trowels or cat litter boxes?

“Well, yeah, you gotta be consistent,” Mr. Power says with a smile.

It was a mixture, the trio say, decided upon after talking with a cob expert, watching countless online tutorials, and then, finally, making test-bricks to dry in the sun: some crumbled, some seemed a bit off, and then, finally, the right one came out rock-hard.

But why cob, an ancient building material generally made from clay, water, straw and lime? And why next door to Ms. Kyles’s Prince Edward County, Ont., house (she calls it The Gryphon)? After saving the 1830s Regency cottage in Ancaster, Ont. and moving it to PEC in 2012 at great effort, frustration, and expense, Ms. Kyles admits that saving something else wasn’t exactly top of mind. However, a friendship with local engineer, Ernie Margetson – saver and restorer of multiple buildings in PEC – proved her downfall.

“I endeavour to reuse buildings that are going over to the wood recycler,” says Mr. Margetson, standing in his driveway near a driving shed – the kind for horse carriages and driving tack – that he saved and relocated.

“And he knows that I’m the same,” Ms. Kyles says with a mock smirk.

“It’s still got the fingerprints from the people who built it,” he finishes.

So, in 2018, when Mr. Margetson tipped Ms. Kyles off about a nearby farm on Clossen Road that was clearing some buildings – including a pig pen that he took and turned into a tool shed – and that he could get her a nice, 20- by- 25-foot post-and-beam carriage house for The Gryphon, she agreed.

However, as permits were being acquired and Mr. Beaton and Mr. Power were being scheduled for the reassembly of the structure, Ms. Kyles faced some choices. What use would the building have? The Gryphon is already rented out for much of year (Ms. Kyles is on a pension and couldn’t afford to own the property otherwise) so should it be a separate rental? Or an art or yoga or meditation studio that’s included in the price for renting The Gryphon? And what about walls – what should they be made of?

“It would have to be three seasons … so what’s the quickest way to insulate?” she remembers thinking. “I looked into SIPs (structural insulated panels) and I costed it for that size of building and it would’ve been $60,000 … so then I went to straw bale.”

Straw bale, however, would’ve been too wide for her building, so, finally, Mr. Power suggested cob walls even though no one on the team had ever done it. (As an aside, while an Internet search turns up a cob builder in B.C. called Cobworks, this ancient building technique doesn’t seem to have any professional Ontario-based proponents, but rather just a few pioneers who’ve done buildings for themselves).

“Sometimes [in Ontario] you see a frame with brick with what they call ‘nogging’ infill,” says Mr. Beaton. “It’s bricks and then they’ll smear over that brick with something like [cob].”

With a foundation in place and the timber frame up by the summer of 2023, it was time to begin cobbing. But, like straw bale or rammed earth, progress was slow despite using a mixing drum (rather than hand mixing) and the slipform method to create the walls. An entire day’s labour, says Mr. Power, would result in about two feet of wall around the circumference of the building.

Ms. Kyles remembers an even slower pace, and that “my brain was going ‘cha-ching, cha-ching’ this is going to be $200,000 if I let these guys do it!” So, she helped, learned, and then, when the two men went off to another job, she took over, even hand-sculpting the bevelled edges around the windows. Windows came from a Toronto arts and crafts house that was being demolished.

A walk inside what Ms. Kyles now calls the “Carriage House” and it’s immediately apparent that cob walls absorb outside noise quite expertly (there isn’t much of a din, thankfully, since there are more turtles around here than cars). And, given their thickness, the walls provide a feeling of calm and shelter. Despite the parge coat, if one looks closely – especially around the windows – one can see bits of straw poking out. Without any effort whatsoever, one can look up and spot axe-marks on the beautiful old timbers. Dancing colours bounce in from a gorgeous stained-glass, arched window acquired from Paris, Ont.-based restorer Drew Skuce.

Despite the high ceiling, Ms. Kyles has no plans to create a loft: “I would have to change everything; I would have to put in a proper staircase [with a] 42-inch railing … it would change the look and feel.”

All in, Ms. Kyles estimates she spent between $85,000 to $100,000 on the project. Silly to spend that much on a building she didn’t need? Perhaps, but is saving a building any different than finding a “barn fresh” 1964-and-a-half Mustang and spending tens of thousands of dollars to restore it?

Life is short: let the heart rule now and then.