Athena Steen learned to build with earth as a kid on her mother’s pueblo in New Mexico, where if someone needed a house or a room, the family built it from mud and clay.

Almost four decades ago, she and her husband Bill Steen took that knowledge to an old homestead in Canelo, Arizona, with no money, no jobs, and young kids, and began building what is now a multigenerational family village of more than a dozen small earthen buildings, not counting the main houses.

Two of their three sons, Benito and Oso, have come home with their partners and are raising the next generation here. The Steens also built their largest home for Athena’s parents. After they passed away, it became home to Benito, his partner Amy (from New Zealand), and their growing family. Friends who aren’t family live in some of the structures too, trading physical labor for a place to live and learn.

The Steens’ own home was built by the original homesteaders from adobe made of the same dirt that surrounds it. They extensively rebuilt it using earth from their own land. Their sons grew up in the mud and began building rooms and bathrooms as teenagers. Now they’re taking earthen building in new directions.

Benito, a blacksmith, combines clay with metal, wood, and cement, and makes nearly everything in his home by hand, from the sink to the door handles. Oso and his partner bought a used sawmill, and the Forest Service allowed them to fell dead standing trees from a burned area. That wood became the timber frame for their new straw bale and earthen home, raised by friends in a barnraising-style work party. The bale walls went up in a day.

Athena says they’ve never really had money or jobs; they’ve made it work by doing what they love. The family hosts workshops and work parties, does most of the labor themselves, and keeps building slow and on a human scale, with time to rest and new ideas between projects. For Athena, when you’re doing what you believe in, work and play become the same thing.

It’s a philosophy rooted in Athena’s childhood at her mother’s Santa Clara Pueblo, where building with earth was simply part of family life. Canelo is her second act. Years before, she built a tiny straw bale and earthen home in New Mexico with her first husband and lived in it for five years with her two daughters, one of whom has since returned to live for a year at a time in the very first straw bale building on the Canelo property.

Her sons learned the way she did, building homes alongside their mother and their grandmother, one more generation finding a home in the earth.