Welcome to Adobe South

Adobe South offers a boutique innovative design and mentoring service to our building clients with a focus on natural building materials utilising passive solar design practices as we design your home.

Natural building encompasses the principals and practices of eco-healthy and sustainable (aka green) building. Passive solar design principles form the basis of all our designs, - even south facing homes can be designed to trap winter solar sun!

The most common eco-healthy and sustainable building methods use:

	Earth building, be that mud bricks, rammed earth or adobes.
	Strawbale building, with load bearing or infill strawbale walls that are plastered over.
	Timber frame, of wither post and beam, or the light timber framed homes. Light timber framing is used in the bulk of New Zealand’s housing stock.
	Or a combination of these.

An underlying philosophy of sustainability is to minimise the impact on the environment, whilst preserving our resources for the future generations ie walk lightly on the land, and use only what you need! e.g small is smart.

Adobe South has worked extensively with OWNER-BUILDERS by providing easily built and innovative architectural designs. We also offer our well proven and successful mentoring service to our clients.

Owner-Builder

Many clients have been successfully owner-building their homes using Adobe South as their building mentor (advisory and on site "how to") for parts that are foreign and somewhat technical in detail.

Abode South designs homes that are simple to build by folk (women too) who have the desire and enthusiasm to build their home.

Sometimes a builder will assist the owner with the wall framing and detailing of the roof.

Introductory weekend workshops run by Adobe South have proven an invaluable way to learn how to build with sustainable and eco-healthy materials.

The Department of Building and Housing, which has the oversight to ensure all housing is healthy (safe and sanitary), is still considering how to maintain this right of New Zealanders and integrate this tradition into the regulations - we will keep you posted on this count!