It was built at the dawn of the 21st century using a material and technique employed by European settlers in the American Midwest in the 1800s. Now Mississauga’s pioneering straw bale house — believed to be the first of its kind in urban Ontario — is on the market for $2.7 million.

The award-winning home features post and beam construction with straw bale encased in plaster on the interior and exterior first-floor walls. The two-storey, nearly 7,000-square-foot house was also built from painstakingly sourced non-toxic materials to accommodate one of the owner’s environmental sensitivities and allergies. The second floor is regular stick-frame construction.

Designed for the shared living arrangement of three women, including the current owner, the interior offers common and private space. The women, who have since parted ways for health and personal reasons, wanted the support and companionship of friends while maintaining their privacy and independence.

“This house wasn’t meant to be lived in alone. It’s meant for community,” said the current sole owner Cheryl Bradbee, an adjunct professor, who has a PhD in architecture history and planning, and teaches at Ryerson University and Humber College. She bought out the previous co-owners.

At the heart of the L-shaped house is a large, bright common kitchen, dining room and great room with soaring ceilings, a stone fireplace that backs on the kitchen and doubles as a pizza oven. The shared space connects three separate 1,000-square-foot apartments, each with its own roughed-in kitchen, full bathroom, living area, separate bedroom and exterior and interior access doors. There is a fourth smaller apartment below grade with a walkout onto a private patio.

Bradbee believes the house would be ideal for a multi-generational family or a health facility. She doesn’t want to sell to a developer that might tear it down.

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“The house is amazing. I don’t know if I’ll ever have this quality of housing again,” she said. “It has this quality of stillness about it that’s actually quite lovely. People walk in and kind of sigh. There’s something about it. The thick walls I think. There’s a kind of a solidity to it.”

Designed by Martin Liefhebber, a Toronto architect with a reputation for using sustainable materials, the brown and white house is set back from the road, blending naturally with the trees and landscaping on the half-acre, previously vacant plot.

The interior has a Scandinavian, tactile simplicity in the smooth stucco walls, concrete floors and wooden posts hewn from trees cut on the property.

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A “truth window” in the great room has been left unplastered to expose the straw inside the walls. Made from bales from Caledon, Ont., the walls were assembled by volunteers over two weekends in May 2000, and “sewed” together in their wire casing using specially crafted stainless steel needles.

Situated in the Clarkson neighbourhood near the Rattray Marsh Conservation Area, it is steps from the busy Lakeshore Rd. W. shopping strip, but its garden attracts foxes, rabbits, birds and insects.

“In the summer you have no sense of the road at all. It’s behind a veil of greenery,” Bradbee said.

She thinks it was the first project manager on the house’s construction who suggested straw bale. Brian Lenehan returned last month to walk the property before it sold with his brothers Dale and Gerald. (A second project manager Rolph Paloheimo saw it through completion in January 2003.)

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The City of Mississauga initially refused to permit the straw bale construction. But it relented after two hearings before the Ontario Building Code Commission.

“When we were building it everybody was saying, ‘Straw bale in Ontario, no, won’t work, the extremes are too much.’ But it looks pristine,” said Lenehan, who was there in mid-1999 when the project broke ground.

He had built additions and helped his brother build a house, but he had never done an entire project himself. Lenehan remains “infatuated” with straw bale.

“For me it was a really steep learning curve but it was the best job I ever had,” he said.

“I like all the organic curves. If I was going to build a house for myself I’d make it out of straw,” said Lenehan, who at one point, dropped to his knees and swept his palms across the warm concrete floor.

“Wow it’s nice, it’s so nice — give yourself a pat on the back,” he murmured, surveying the gently curved windows in the great room and recalling the challenge of pouring the low, curved concrete wall in Bradbee’s apartment.

“This was the first urban straw bale house in Ontario and is probably still the largest. I used to joke that in 400 years, this house would just be settling in,” Bradbee said.

The house has photo voltaic panels on the roof that produce about a third of its electricity and it has in-floor heating throughout. There is no air conditioning but generally remains cool, Bradbee said.

“I’ve never paid more than $2,900 for a year of heating,” she said.

The walls are 18 inches thick, which adds to their insulation value, Bradbee said. But there are few interior supporting walls so the floor plan could be easily reconfigured.

Bradbee, who teaches on resilience and climate change adaption, often invites her students to tour her home.

“I tell my students that considering the urgency of climate change, their job in life is to build an ark. An ark is any vehicle metaphorically that transports you or other species through climate chaos. An ark could be good urban planning, it could be a transit system, it could be a piece of property where you plant trees.This house is an ark and the landscape is an ark because it makes space for other species. It is a lovely place to be and yet you’re in the city within a 15- or 20-minute walk to a (Clarkson) GO station,” she said.

She says she is looking for a buyer who understands that responsibility, rather than an investor who will extract the equity and “skedaddle off.”

Finding the right buyer for such a specific property will be “difficult but not impossible,” says listing agent Lesli Gaynor, who is holding open houses at 977 Meadow Wood Rd. on Saturday and Sunday between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m.

Correction – May 7, 2019: This article was edited from a previous version that said the house is 5,000 square feet. In fact, according to the owner, the new measurements show that it is closer to 7,000 square feet.

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