hackney's house of straw is sign of buildings to come

Plastered bales of straw are the main material for an innovative new building at Hackney City Farm, an education and training facility completed by Amazonails in December. The building points the way forward for companies and clients looking for sustainable and less environmentally damaging forms of construction over the years ahead.

The materials for a house built with straw bales cost about the same as those needed for a conventional timber-frame house, but significantly less than brick and block. A family-sized strawbale house in the UK would cost about £60,000 plus the price of the land. The UK currently produces 4 million tons of straw a year more than it needs. This is sufficient to build 250,000 homes a year.

Strawbale buildings are not the fire risk you might imagine. They have been subjected to rigorous testing by Amazonails, who say that the bales resist burning for the same reason it is difficult to burn a telephone directory. It is easy to set fire to one page, but not to a dense block of paper. When plastered, strawbale walls have an even greater resistance to fire.

Design consultant Barbara Jones, the director of Amazonails, recently supervised the construction of the largest strawbale building in the UK, the new offices and auction room of fine art auctioneers G E Sworder and Sons of Stansted Mountfitchet in Essex, which will open in May. The building was constructed using a new technique called ‘compressive framing’ in which the roof is supported on a timber frame while the strawbale walls are constructed. It is then lowered onto the strawbales, which become the loadbearing structure. The roof then protects the strawbale walls from the weather while they are being plastered.

Strawbale building techniques will be demonstrated at this year's Ecobuild show, an annual event dedicated to sustainable forms of design and construction, at Earl's Court from 26-28 February.

luxury underwear by buttress and snatch

The Hackney company Buttress and Snatch recently featured prominently in a Guardian survey of the growing luxury underwear trade. Journalist Leonie Cooper writes of a "backlash against disposable fashion" and a "lingerie renaissance" which includes "a flourishing of upmarket, bijoux underwear brands."

"Rachel Kenyon fell in love with underwear thanks to her glamorous French grandmother's pink boudoir. A fashion graduate of Bristol UWE, she now runs the frilly and silly underwear label Buttress and Snatch, which has fast become a burlesque favourite. When it was founded in 1999, however, it was nothing more than a lighthearted performance-art project. "We were all about dressing up fancy and showing off," says Kenyon. "It wasn't called burlesque or anything then. It was quite a funny joke to dress up like olden-days ladies when we'd all spent years being scruffy punk rockers." Now Kenyon's flamboyant bloomers are worn by the likes of Christina Aguilera and Madonna, and over the past year Buttress and Snatch has racked up top underwear sales in Barneys department store in New York, which she attributes to the fact that "I don't scrimp on the frills and fanciness".

Kenyon admits she always has a waiting list for her showy designs: "I've never been able to keep up with making enough pants for everyone who wants them!" Kenyon's underwear is less than cheap because of her time-intensive methods and use of deluxe but ethical fabrics. "The clothing industry these days is all about mass production, globalisation, cost cutting and maximising profits rather than craftsmanship, tradition and beautiful things," she laments. She uses vintage trims and hand-clipped lace from the last real lace company in Nottingham, and all production takes place in the UK with local materials, to support the British fabric industry."