In the listing, Kate and Matt say they were driven mainly by being priced out of the conventional Melbourne property market and by a desire to live a sustainable, self-sufficient life connected to a community. They designed the house themselves. The architect is Martin Freney of Earthship Eco Homes, whose project page for the Cygnet village<\/a> notes that the build was featured in the first episode of the 12th series of Grand Designs Australia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Earthships are the invention of American architect Michael Reynolds, who came to Taos, New Mexico, after finishing architecture school in 1969. According to his company’s history page<\/a>, the early buildings used discarded steel or tin beer cans, before recycling existed. Reynolds set out six principles: natural and recyclable materials, passive solar heating and cooling, self-sufficiency in energy, water and sewage treatment, and food grown with the home’s treated wastewater.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Freney is a licensed building designer with a PhD on Earthships. His Earthship Ironbank, near Adelaide, was the first Earthship in Australia to be approved by local government, according to his firm’s website<\/a>. For his doctorate, he tracked indoor temperature and humidity in Earthships in the U.S. and Australia, and his firm says he concluded that they suit most climates in Australia with minimal energy for heating and cooling. Tropical regions need a different design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The classic Earthship recipe calls for old car tires, each one pounded full of dirt with a sledgehammer and stacked like giant bricks. It works, but it is slow, punishing labor. Cygnet went another way. Its walls are rammed earth, damp soil packed hard into a mold one layer at a time, which Freney chose to add beauty and make construction easier with local tradespeople.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The owners call the switch from tires to rammed earth the ultimate game-changer. Thick earth heats up slowly and lets the heat go slowly, a trait builders call thermal mass. In Cygnet, the walls and an insulated concrete foundation soak up heat by day and give it back at night. “These walls act as massive thermal batteries,” the owners wrote. Their modern finish also helped the project through Huon Valley Council planning and building approvals, they say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sunroom runs along the north side of the house, which faces the sun in Tasmania, as a long glass corridor with a concrete floor and planting beds on one edge. The owners treat the room as a wet buffer zone and grow food in it all year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Used water from the sinks, showers and laundry drains into those beds, gets filtered through the soil and ends up watering the crops. Fresh air comes in through earth tubes, pipes buried in the ground where the soil keeps a steady temperature, so the air reaches the rooms naturally tempered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Inside there are cob walls of clay, sand and straw, with bottle bricks set in for decoration. Old doors from an apple shed got a second life, and some antique furniture now holds the bathroom sinks. Bottles can go much further. In Brazil, one family built a seven-bedroom house from 8,000 beach bottles<\/a>. Tires have their fans too, like the owners of a tire home that stays near 68 F<\/a> with no heating or air conditioning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like many Earthship builds, Cygnet doubled as a class. Freney’s page has a workshop group shot of about 20 people in work boots and beanies under the open timber roof frame, with a dog in the middle. An Indigenous smoking ceremony opened the workshop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Volunteers are not a free building crew, though. They come to learn skills, the owners warn, and when they go home, you need to finish what is left to do. The owners named the massive physical toll of the build as the thing they wish they had known going in. Choosing quality and cost, they wrote, meant sacrificing time. Their advice to other owner-builders is “Pace your passion.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Freney describes the north-facing block in Tasmania’s south as the home for five Earthships. Each household will own its lot and house under a strata title, which works much like a condo. Everyone shares the rest: a fruit orchard, a shed, an area watered with treated wastewater and the driveways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Matt’s father gets the second house, which the family calls the Father-ship, and the owners say it is nearly done. A Community Hub for music, seed saving and classes is already up. “We want to prove that living small and sustainable can lead to a big and connected life,” the owners wrote. Other families are testing the same idea, like one building a large earthen house in the desert on solar power and rainwater<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That $0 is the owners’ claim, with no meter data published. Their listing says the solar panels and battery will be fitted once energy consumption has been measured from normal everyday use. Water comes from rain caught in large tanks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The house’s 7.4 energy rating misses the greenhouse, they add, because the rating system cannot accurately assess it. Freney’s firm says his doctoral monitoring found Earthship residents very comfortable despite being off-grid. Comfort and kilowatt-hours are different things. When researchers connected the solar panels, battery and heat pump of one home directly<\/a>, the measured data showed energy being wasted every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No price tag appears anywhere in the listing. The owners’ full description was published by Sustainable House Day<\/a> ahead of its 2026 open day, and the Cygnet Earthship was listed for in-person tours on May 17, 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Photo: Cassie Sullivan \/ Earthship Eco Homes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kate and Matt, two owner-builders priced out of Melbourne, have built a 2,286-square-foot (212.4-square-meter) Earthship in Cygnet, in southern Tasmania, … <\/p>\nWhere Earthships come from<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Rammed earth replaced the tires<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
A greenhouse, earth tubes and bottle bricks<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Glass](\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/cygnet-earthship-sunroom-greenhouse.jpg\")
Volunteers came to learn and build<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Workshop](\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/cygnet-earthship-workshop-volunteers.jpg\")
Five homes on one shared block<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What has not been measured yet<\/h2>\n\n\n\n