Sir Cobalot

I sat down with Miguel Elliot, also know for his “acoblishments” as Sir Cobalot on “The Positive Fantastic” podcast. Miguel has found satisfaction in natural building since he was a kid. For my own part, when I was a little girl, I remember hearing that my great aunt Jean McCord and her partner Phyllis had built an adobe home here in Northern California. I didn’t totally know what that meant at the time, but I did register that the adults all thought that it was quite the accomplishment. Later in life I looked back on the fact that I had a natural building, lesbian, author aunt in my family with pride for my roots and awe for the multiple layers of overlap. 

Fast forward to when I was a bit older and I found myself hitch hiking to Mexico with a loose ambition to spend some time at a natural building oasis near San Miguel de Allende with a couple expats who were creating a small eco-village and school to teach people how to build earth bag buildings. I was immediately hooked, and my hosts actually asked me to stay on longer to help manage the other interns, and I did. Getting up in the morning to feed their donkey Luna her breakfast, I then cooked vegetarian fare for the humans, and spent the rest of the day working on infilling dirt bags for a earthen dome or tiling a mosaic hot tub. 

Not long after that first experience, a dear friend from college asked me if I wanted to come learn how to do natural building in his mom’s walnut orchard in Lake County, California. I agreed, and worked my way back up from Mexico to learn about straw bale, cob, and natural plasters from Massey Burke while we created a fabulous natural building fusion structure that allowed me to learn about a lot of different kinds of building techniques all in one go. 

After that I fell in love, moved to the Frey ranch, and spent years creating structures with my partner Daniel to add onto our small cabin home primarily using a clay-straw infill method. We made a tree house for our son, a guest house space with a cob sauna and a passive solar greenhouse bathhouse, and we even put a green roof on top. I’ve done almost no conventional building in my life, because I believe that the noxious materials used in regular construction are contributing to the problems we are having as modern humans. And I firmly believe that natural building is definitely a part of the solution. 

Sir Cobalot joined the podcast to discuss the wonderful capacities of cob. He explained how cob is not just a tool for natural construction with durable craftsmanship that is easy on the budget, but also a tool for social justice in support of unsheltered persons. Over the years, Sir Cobalot has developed some amazing innovations through his company “Living Earth Structures,” which he is making open source available so that the word can spread and everyone can have access to his exceptionally functional cob hacks. Miguel is using his position as Sir Cobalot to spread the news about his innovative modern twist, which develops the art and practice of cob building with a heightened functionality because he’s repurposing pallets as infill for the walls of his buildings. Tune in to learn about Sir Cobalot’s process and to get some giggles about the special cob-centric vocabulary that he has created too.