EcoCocon - Straw Wall System

28/10/2026

For decades, everyone who built with straw heard the same thing. Nice for a house. Maybe a school. Never for real buildings.

Paul Lynch heard it too. Years ago in Finland, he said he wanted to build a straw apartment building. People laughed.

Today he can walk through the answer. ETC Hyllie in Malmö is the tallest straw building in the world.

▶️ Watch the full story: https://youtu.be/Sr8fWfC_1dg?x=1

What once got laughed at is now a building people chose to live in. Thousands of people backed Hyllie before it was built, simply because they wanted homes like this to exist. Residents now feel the difference every day: fresh air, warm wood, a home that feels alive. Once people have lived like this, a concrete box starts to feel like a step back. That kind of demand doesn’t stay in one building.

That’s why Hyllie matters so much. The doubt was always “it won’t work for real buildings.” Now there is a real building, and it works. Straw construction no longer needs to make the argument. It has proof you can stand in. 🌾

Vision/client: ETC Bygg · Built by: Bygg AB Fredrik Fagerberg · Architect: Kaminsky Arkitektur · Structural engineer/Architect: Strombro Building Workshop· Wall system: EcoCocon

ETC Hyllie in Malmö is the world’s tallest straw building. Twelve s...

27/10/2026

The Netherlands is aiming for 100,000 new homes a year. It also wants 30% of new homes built with at least 30% bio-based materials by 2030. Both targets meet in one question: can a bio-based home be built the same way, again and again?

Ons Natuurhuis is designed as an answer to that question. One terraced home type, factory-made wall elements, a street that goes up fast.

It began as a competition by Nedam Development , with more than 70 entries. The winning team, Strotec with architecten|en|en and Van Herpen, built the concept around a load-bearing straw wall system, supplied by Strotec with EcoCocon panels. The straw panels carry load, insulate and bind carbon in one element, which keeps the installations simple.

Now it is on site. The walls have been going up since September, and with pre-assembled elements the street is taking shape fast. On the south side, PV panels already cover the roof. On the north side, the green roof is being laid and the first plants are taking root, before anyone has moved in.

The design reaches beyond the walls. The homes sit slightly above ground so the landscape runs right up to the house, the green roof continues into a green facade, and each home gets its own rain barrel. Designed for the neighbours, the water and the birds, not just the people inside.

20/10/2026

🌱 EcoCocon is a founding member of the Bio-based Europe Alliance!

Today, the Commission, under the leadership of EU Commissioner Roswall, officially launches the Bio-based Europe Alliance, bringing together organisations committed to accelerating Europe's transition to a thriving bioeconomy.

At EcoCocon, we believe that building a more sustainable future starts with the materials we choose. 🌾

By turning agricultural by-products like straw into high-performance building systems, we're already demonstrating what's possible.But transforming an industry takes more than innovation. It takes collaboration, stronger market demand and a shared commitment to making bio-based solutions mainstream.

🤝 Connecting for Impact is one of our core values — and exactly why we're excited to join the Alliance as a founding member.
We look forward to working with other European frontrunners to turn ambition into action and help bring bio-based materials into the mainstream.
Together, we can make bio-based the new normal. 🌍

14/10/2026

There’s a version of the housing conversation that stays stuck in tradeoffs. Fast or sustainable. Cheap or good. Scalable or biobased. Pick two.

Rustenburgstraat in Eindhoven quietly ignores that framing.

We brought a camera into the assembly hall where 89 social housing units for developer Trudo are being built. Bjørn, our CTO, walks through how a wall goes from raw material to a finished, ready-to-install element. The Bouwbedrijf Gebroeders van Herpen BV project manager shows how the whole sequence holds together, unit after unit, without losing precision. And you see where it lands: finished homes on the same street the old ones stood on.

What the footage shows better than any spec sheet: this is fast, practical, repeatable construction, and the straw panels in the walls hold biogenic carbon instead of emitting it. Not as a compromise. As the same build.

That’s the part worth paying attention to. Housing at this scale is one of the hardest problems in Europe right now. Rustenburgstraat doesn’t solve it alone, but it shows one way the pieces can actually fit together.

🎥 Full walkthrough: https://youtu.be/e2P-VEleNxc

Client:
Architect: Architects
EcoCocon panels supplied by:
Contractor: Gebroeders van Herpen BV

These social homes in Eindhoven look like any other new street. Ins...

06/10/2026

Great buildings start with great relationships. 🤝

This year our Partner Meeting took us to Slovakia. Day one began in Voderady, home of our factory, where the people who build with our panels saw where they come from. Day two moved to Trnava, where the theme was Straw and Games: serious expertise, delivered with a lot of play. 🌾🎲

No slides, no stiff vibes, just people who actually care about building better, having a proper laugh together. 😄
Thank you to all our partners for the energy, the humour, and for making Slovakia feel like a team gathering. 💚

09/09/2026

he cedar cladding on this house grew just metres from where it now stands, on the client's own farmland. 🌳

That loop, timber grown on site and returned to site as part of the building, sets the tone for the whole project. Wooden House replaces a tired dormer bungalow on the Camel Estuary, Cornwall, built with the EcoCocon prefabricated straw panel system and designed by Kast Architects. The footprint was rotated 90 degrees to bring the long elevation south, with timber brise-soleil and louvred screens controlling solar gain across the principal rooms.

The same local, low carbon logic runs through every material decision. Internally, the timber frame is left exposed and the EcoCocon panels are finished in clay plaster, a breathable alternative to conventional linings. The slim raft foundation sits on compacted foam glass instead of petroleum-based insulation, and plastic has been minimised throughout the build. Even the landscaping reflects it: bird and bat boxes built into the fabric of the house, a shallow pond, and a wildflower meadow on site.

Delivered with J Orchard Construction, RBQS as quantity surveyor, Martin Perry Associates as structural engineer, and joinery and kitchens by Meadows Kitchens, Wooden House brings the design and construction choices together with the same care.

This is what circularity in construction should look like: material grown on the land, returned to the land as part of the house. It's a way to go: local materials, a low-carbon envelope, and a building that belongs to the place it stands in.

Full project: https://www.kastarchitects.com/work/wooden-house/

Photography: Form Photography

26/08/2026

Ask five architects what an EcoCocon building looks like, and you'll get five different answers. So we wrote an article about it.

The straw and timber wall does the same structural and thermal work on every project, quietly, consistently. What happens on the outside is where that consistency stops.

Timber cladding left to weather naturally. Render, soft and earthen. Brick that disappears into the street. Building with a bio-based material was never about designing within limits, it's about the architect having the final say on how the building looks, not the material underneath.

A few of the finishes in the carousel, all of them in the article 👇
https://ecococon.eu/blog/what-does-an-ecococon-building-look-like

18/08/2026

Every architect knows the distance between the sketch and what actually gets built. Somewhere in between, something usually gets negotiated away.

Often it starts with the structure. The span, the wall thickness, the opening that has to shrink.

This is a 436.40 m² home in Berango, País Vasco, designed by José Luis Barrón Fernández and Juan Ciudad Herrero on load-bearing EcoCocon straw walls and a lightweight glue-laminated timber frame. The sketches and the construction photos show the same project at two stages.

What sits on top of those straw walls: a ventilated ceramic facade, glass floors, and a triple-height atrium working as a passive solar chimney. The panels went up like any other prefabricated system, the external membrane applied as part of the build-up, and the wall took the finish the design called for.

Built by Bion Técnicas y Aplicaciones Constructivas S.L., 2022–2024, Berango, País Vasco.

13/08/2026

This house started with a love of red rock and long hikes.

The owners kept coming back to the desert around Kanab, Utah, for the trails, the cliffs, and the nearby national parks. Eventually, they decided they wanted to spend more time there, so they built a place of their own — a vacation home in a climate that puts any building to the test, with dry heat by day and sharp temperature drops at night.

They built the house with the EcoCocon wall system trying to meet the Passive House standard, using climate data for that exact location. And it is in this demanding setting that the walls quietly do their work. The house was designed for an annual heating demand of 10 kWh/m² and a cooling demand of 7 kWh/m², both well under the Passive House threshold of 15 kWh/m². Straw walls with carefully minimised thermal bridging help keep indoor temperatures stable as the desert swings from hot to cold.

The owners put the house up for rent because they wanted more people to experience what a Passive House actually feels like. Not just read the numbers. Feel the difference: stable temperatures, quiet interiors, and a sense of ease in a place where maintaining comfortable conditions can require a lot of energy.

And this is where a desert house becomes relevant far beyond Utah. The conditions may be more extreme there, but the underlying challenge is increasingly familiar across Europe: keeping buildings comfortable as summer temperatures rise, without becoming ever more dependent on cooling.

The story does not stop with one desert retreat. Across Europe, the same wall system is already being used in buildings of different types and scales — acting as a buffer between everyday life and the increasingly demanding conditions outside.

Comfort you can feel, even as summers grow hotter.

03/08/2026

Passive House has a reputation for being hard to hit. Most of that difficulty shows up on site: airtightness that leaks, junctions that bridge heat, details that look fine on paper and fail with a blower door.

A lot of that gets easier when the wall arrives with the hard parts already solved.

So we asked a narrower question: how far does the EcoCocon system get you on its own?

The carousel pulls out what the EcoCocon system brings to the Passive House standard. The blog does the rest, what Passive House actually asks for, the five principles behind it, and where the system stops and design takes over.

Read the full article: https://ecococon.eu/blog/meeting-the-passive-house-standard-with-ecococon