Earthships & Natural Housing
Houses built from mud, stone, local wood, and reclaimed waste. Warm, cheap, beautiful — and not a mortgage in sight.
Why we build differently
The modern housing industry is environmentally toxic — cement, steel, glass, synthetic paints, plastic fittings. And it has become so expensive that most people can only afford a house by signing up for a 30- or 50-year mortgage. That's three decades of working for the corporate bosses, and if you can't keep up, you lose the house. Fear, insecurity, and enslavement, all for one of a human being's most basic needs: shelter.
At Karuna we've been quietly working on alternatives.
Mud, stone, local wood
We've built several houses with mud walls and beautiful artistic finishes. One of our wood cabins is built from a tree we planted eighteen years ago. Local wood, mud, stone, lime wash — in other words, materials you can source within a few miles.
Design matters too. Good orientation for light and air, natural water flow, and you end up with a home that works with its climate rather than fighting it.
The Earthship
An Earthship is a house built from what most people throw away. Used tyres packed with earth become thermal-mass walls. Bottles and tins become decorative elements. With the right design, you get a strong, warm, beautiful home out of what was heading to the landfill.
Alex Leeor built the first Earthship in India, right here at Karuna Dham. Since then the idea has spread and we've hosted workshops on it.
Design principles
- Electricity — from the sun.
- Water — from rain, used four times.
- Sewage — treated on site in botanical planters.
- Heating & cooling — from the sun and the earth itself.
- Food — grown inside and outside.
Earthships can be built in any climate, anywhere in the world. They work for poor communities doing cheap self-builds, and they can equally be adapted into luxury homes — still carbon-balanced in the truest sense. Going green doesn't have to mean giving up comfort. It means working in harmony with the land, the local resources, and — as a result — with yourself.
Power
Every house at Karuna has solar power. For six months of the year, while the stream is flowing, a micro-hydro generator gives us more. We don't use the national grid at all. Sometimes friends call up to ask the cricket score because they have a power cut in town. We rarely have one.
