What is Mud Dauber School?
We met and began building with cob together in 2009; in the years after, Greg was busy with contract work and instructing cob workshops, while Danielle built her own cob house. After starting a family and purchasing our current property in rural Snow Camp, NC, we lived for two years in Danielle’s tiny cob house while building what is now our strawbale home!
The Mud Dauber School campus shares land with our homestead. We began running natural building workshops here in 2014, and have co-created with our students a series of natural demonstration cottages, garden walls, and community spaces. With each new season, we continue to work on our campus, building new spaces and finishing old ones.
Our mission is to empower people by teaching them the skills of natural building. We believe in the effectiveness of hands-on learning, and we make that our focus. We also recognize the importance of community, and weave this belief into our workshop format through shared meals, cob oven pizza parties, and emphasizing a team approach on the worksite.
We continue to be inspired by all of the people who join us here each year, and feel deeply satisfied to be part of the natural building world.
-Greg and Danielle
OUR TEAM
Greg - Co-founder, Lead Instructor
Greg apprenticed at the Cob Cottage Company (with Ianto Evans and Linda Smiley) in 2008, and left that experience feeling passionate about spreading the knowledge and joy of natural building to others. He began teaching workshops in central North Carolina in 2009, and then bought rural land and started a homestead with Danielle in 2014. This is when we officially began teaching under the Mud Dauber School name, and at our current campus.
Greg was born and raised in Syracuse, NY. Favorite childhood memories involve camping in the Adirondack Mountains, cross-country road trips with his family, drawing/designing tiny living spaces, building with Legos, and endlessly making art. During his college years – studying Industrial Design - he became interested in pottery, cooking, thinking about the human/earth relationship, and working/living outdoors. All these things ultimately led Greg to cob and natural building.
In the same way that he deeply appreciates the change of seasons, he finds satisfaction and balance in the ebb and flow of shifting work throughout the year. He really loves teaching our workshops, and meeting the inspiring and creative people (from all over the country!) who attend them. Greg also enjoys working alone or with a small group on natural building contract projects – building things for local people that inspire them to spend more time outside or connect them with the healing power of clay.
Danielle - Co-founder, Lead Instructor
Danielle’s love of building began in childhood, and she spent many weekends at her father’s drafting table. Drafting plans, watching how-to building shows, and her parents’ construction projects all sparked a desire to build her own home.
After attending a cob building workshop in 2009, Danielle’s passion for natural building was kindled. She volunteered on every project available to learn about dry-stacked masonry, foundation systems, earthen floors, natural plastering, and green roofing basics. Inspired by all she learned, in 2010 Danielle built her own tiny cob home. With little money, and a lot of time and help from friends, she built a 12’x12’ two story cob cottage. Her cottage was built with cob mixed entirely by foot on a foundation of dry-stacked salvaged concrete pieces. It also features an earthen floor, clay and lime plasters, a green “living” roof, and cat stairs and cat nooks encircling the entire exterior.
Danielle is passionate about sharing the opportunity for people to get hands-on experience through the Mud Dauber workshops, where she focuses on creating a welcoming, ego-free environment where everyone can feel comfortable. She sees the campus as a place of reciprocal learning, where we can pause our regular routines and dream about what else is possible. Danielle believes that working with these natural materials, and accessing our power to create, can be a path towards greater connection- with our selves, each other, and the natural world.
In addition to workshops, Danielle works in the natural building field. In her spare time, she enjoys growing food and native plants, spinning yarn, playing the banjo, making art, making things, and being a mama.
GUEST INSTRUCTORS:
Stephen Hren - Guest Instructor, “Intro to Permitted Cob”
Stephen Hren is a builder, writer and home inspector who lives in Durham, NC. He has been active for the past quarter century in building with cob and utilizing other natural and solar technologies to facilitate greater connectedness with our non-human neighbors. He has completed two of the first inspected cob residences in North Carolina and continues to work and advocate for bringing holistic building practices into the mainstream, and empowering individuals to build for themselves for their own independence and for future generations.
April Magill - Guest Instructor, “Intro to Hempcrete”
April is a leading voice in the advancement of alternative, climate-smart & healthy building methods and has been a pioneer in the southeast. She is an Architect, small business owner, Executive Director, and Adjunct Professor; April has been a keynote speaker and presenter to many organizations and universities over the past decade.
April has been a Charleston County resident since 2004 and has devoted her career to the advancement of sustainable architecture and affordable housing. After advancing her career at several Charleston architecture firms, in 2011 she took a leap of faith and founded Root Down Designs, a women-led architecture firm dedicated to sustainable architecture and affordable housing in the south where she serves as the Principal Architect. April pioneered several carbon-negative and alternative housing prototypes in Charleston, such as a Rammed-Earth home and Compressed Earth Blocks. She has worked with multiple building jurisdictions in helping clients obtain building permits for alternative materials and healthy housing. Working with financially-challenged clients and creating affordable building options has been a strong tenant of the Root Down team.
As a way to educate about these healthy and natural building materials, she began teaching building workshops with a ‘community-building’ ethos embedded. April has led over 4 dozen community-building workshops and courses across the southeast, including educational institutions such as Greenville Technical College, The Governor’s School of Science & Math, and the American College of Building Arts. Her passion for sustainable architecture and community-building workshops was noticed by The American College of the Building Arts, and she began serving as the Professor of Sustainable Materials in 2018.
Tim Callahan - Guest Instructor, “Intro to Hempcrete”
Tim Callahan is a former naval architect and general contractor. He is now in his fifth decade of design-build work, with extensive experience in guitar-making, timber framing, custom cabinetry, custom blue-water sailboats and residential construction. Since 1995, his work has been focused on the creation of healthy & energy-efficient homes. In an effort to develop a model for a low-carbon and non-toxic living environment, Tim led the design team for the Nauhaus Prototype in 2009; this was the first of 10 permitted hemp-lime projects which he has designed, ranging in size from 1200-9600 square feet. In 2005, Tim authored the book, ‘Building Green: A Complete Guide to Alternative Building Methods.” Tim lives in Asheville, NC, where he enjoys the outdoors and making music with his friends.