

After attending a cob-building workshop in Oregon, Dana Jenks came home to Sacramento with a vision for building something of her own. She was going through a particularly stressful time in her personal life, and she found that the solitary, hands-on nature of cob building to be healing. One aspect of cob design that many find appealing is flexible creativity on the fly. Dana incorporated design elements as she went along, working a little at a time over the course of a year. 

Although Dana had some help from family and neighbors, she did most of the building by herself. She and her neighbors had taken down fences for repair, and this allowed for unexpected interaction during the careful process of building and design. 


Linda Smiley and Ianto Evans are two of the most well known names in the burgeoning world of modern cob design, both in North America and elsewhere. In many ways, they are pioneers for modern cob, as there was virtually no one building with cob at the end of the twentieth century. Their company, Cob Cottage, grew from their own experiences building with cob in the Pacific Northwest, in the early 1990s. Because they could find no one with direct cob-building experience, their experiments in cob design began with observation of old cob buildings in Great Britain, then evolved as they designed their first cob home, a hybrid cob/wood cabin structure (Elizabeth 122). Some years later, they designed and built an all-cob house, 120 sq. ft. With its curved living spaces, the cottage took on a modified heart shape—thus the name. Ianto explains: “Although our house became heart-shaped, the floorplan was not based on the concept of ‘heart’….The design grew, like lilies on a pond, in response to the activities we needed to have enclosed” (Evans 87).
Most of the windows are built on the south side of the Heart House to promote passive solar heating. Ianto and Linda kept their cottage to 120 sq. ft. in order to fall outside their county’s building permit requirement. Heart House has plenty of amenities, however. 

Heart House is a great example of the versatility of cob as a design medium. Note the way the shelf above the alcove is an extension of the curved wall. Plaster made with lime is painted over the cob surface, creating a durable finish with a soft effect in the room. The heart shaped window is another design element especially suited to cob.

Dana Jenks’s cob gazebo and the Heart House of Ianto Evans and Linda Smiley are design projects on a humble, human scale. The human body and the needs of the particular bodies that will inhabit the structures are the primary standards for these designs. Just how one goes about making a home from such humble stuff as clay, sand, water and straw is the next part of our adventure into cob design.

What’s in a name? 