A guest bedroom built with a technique called earthbags, using onion sacks filled with mud and lime, and compacted; sun dried bricks called adobe

Oviya supervises the research and development on the site and has also attended workshops in places such as Dharamshala and Tiruvannamalai to equip herself to teach other women. 

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Lime artisans from Rajasthan and a team from the Northeast adept at building with bamboo have conducted workshops at the site while The Hobbit House’s own team too, has offered workshops on earthbag construction, different types of lime plasters such as Thappi and Lohi and the setting up of lime tanks. One of Pangal’s objectives through this project is to educate people about the benefits of building with lime. Cement is not really amenable to building a shelter, the material being both toxic and unable to breathe and resultantly not sustainable given that it leads to higher consumption of energy in the form of air conditioners and heaters.

The team in front of a 16,000-litre capacity cement-free water tank they built

“I have always felt strongly about the need for equal opportunity and empowering women,” Pangal shares, while pointing to practical concerns such as the labour-intensive aspect of natural building. “It felt like a safe, sensible thing to do to have women builders around.” She also points out that natural building is an intricate process that demands mindfulness and an attention to detail, qualities that women are more naturally inclined to present. Natural building, moreover, is a slow process that falls under the more conscious approach known as “slow building”. Pangal cites the example of a large cement-free water tank that the team has been trying to build on the site to practise rainwater harvesting, explaining that after using lime, one has to let it cure for a month after which the first layer of plasters has to sit for another month, followed by another layer of plaster. “Natural construction hasn’t been studied much, so it’s not something that comes out of a packet, which means that we have to test everything on site. It took us about four-five months to get our mortar mix right let alone start to build with it,” she says. “We have to give time for research and developing the technique on site which is hyperlocal and specific to our site and there’s a lot of curing time in between as well.” 

Oviya and Sindhoor Pangal

Apart from rainwater harvesting, Pangal also plans to test out other earth-friendly principles like permaculture farming on the site. A user of solar power, she hopes to be reliant on rainwater alone and eventually grow all her natural produce herself. “I want to present to the world that you can have a fully self-sustaining life on a quarter acre. Seventy to 80 per cent of what I consume I should be able to grow, regenerate, and give back, and make a model out of it.” She has also planned for a dog-friendly unit within the construction to be able to do research on free-living dogs. The eventual idea is to build a learning centre for animal- and plant-friendly practices while also generating a viable team of women that can take on multiple projects. “I want to be able to say that I tread the earth lightly and gave back something to it.”