We design beautiful, healthy, low-impact buildings made almost entirely from natural and recycled materials and built to last. We have a strong specialism in designing straw insulated buildings using loadbearing, infill or hybrid strawbale walls, and prefabricated straw-insulated panels.

It can be difficult to put into words how it can feel to be inside a building made from natural materials, but we understand the big impact it can make to our lives to inhabit beautiful, healthy environments.

Who We Are

Matt Bailey

Matt is an Architect with a passion and commitment to natural, healthy architectural design. He has designed a number of strawbale and prefabricated straw panel buildings, and been involved in residential, public and commercial projects. He has experience in community housing, working with existing buildings, and educational and arts projects within other practices throughout his career.

He originally met Barbara attending training courses with the School of Natural Building, during his architectural education. He joined the practice, under our previous name ‘Straw Works,’ in 2018, and became a Director in 2019.

He has been passionate about low impact living, health and wellbeing since before his training in architecture. As such, during his degree at the University of Cambridge he found himself interested particularly in natural materials and passive design principles. He appreciates the importance of craft, making and building in the design process, and has always pursued opportunities to learn practical natural building skills alongside his design work.

His postgraduate studies at the Centre for Alternative Technology, and his numerous practical building courses and trainings in strawbale and other natural building methods have given Matt a deeper understanding of how to design natural, healthy buildings.

He is a registered Architect with the ARB and RIBA.

Barbara Jones

Barbara is the most experienced strawbale builder/designer in the UK and regularly consults and teaches. She pioneered strawbale building in the UK in 1994 and was awarded a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship to learn more, travelling to the USA where it all began. Her background in construction, as a site carpenter and jill of all trades, enabled her to fully understand strawbale building and how it could be made even more sustainable by matching it with other natural materials like timber, lime and clay plaster.

Barbara has always been very principled, using only natural, low embodied energy or recycled materials and never designing with cement or using squirty stuff in tubes. She has developed several cement-free foundation designs, all of which meet UK Planning and Building regulations, and her designs were amongst the earliest sustainable buildings, achieving 2.6 air changes per hour for a pair of loadbearing straw council houses in 2009 without using tapes and membranes, before Passive House became popular.

Her career now spans several decades, and she has developed an international reputation for clear and simple detail that works for building with straw and other natural materials. She is also very well known for her inspirational teaching, both practical - on-site, and theoretical – in the classroom or on-line. She continues to work with the School of Natural Building.

Barbara’s former companies were Amazon Nails in 1989, followed by amazonails and then Straw Works Ltd. In the latter she worked closely with Matt Bailey, and he continues her tradition from Straw Works in the re-named Wellspring Architecture. 

Taking a step back from Directorship, Barbara now works with Matt as a consultant.