Five years ago, Mathieu Munsch walked away from the “normal” script— rent, bills, loans, a 40-hour workweek— and headed for a sloping meadow in northeast France to build something radically simple: a small home made from the earth under his feet, wood from nearby, and straw bales from local farmers.
He kept it to 50 m² on purpose—small enough to draft the plans himself, and to build without hiring an architect or engineer. He simply asked a friend studying engineering to double-check his calculations. The result is a softly rounded earth-and-straw house the town didn’t quite know what to do with at first (“round walls” aren’t exactly the local tradition)… yet they couldn’t argue it didn’t belong: the materials are literally from the land around it.
And the price tag? About €15,000. No mortgage. No utility bills. Just time, patience, and a lot of mud.
But the house is only the beginning. Mathieu is building an entire life around low inputs—less energy, less money, less dependence. He lives off-grid on roughly €200/month, powered by solar panels, with solar thermal for hot water in summer and a wood stove for winter warmth (and water-heating when needed). For water, he doesn’t rely on the town at all: he encourages groundwater into an underground pipe and stores it in a cistern halfway down the hill—made easier by the slope of his land.
Food is where his project becomes something more than “self-sufficiency.” He grows what he can, forages what he can’t—and then he goes a step further into what he calls “tending the wild.” Instead of clearing and controlling nature, he collaborates with it: inoculating mushrooms on logs, encouraging edible plants to thrive, even turning a wet patch of land into a cattail pantry.
And he keeps evolving the site. In the pit left from building the house, he created a submerged greenhouse—a walipini—to extend his growing season. He’s also now building a second earth unit, Japanese-style, as a bathhouse.
As Mathieu puts it: “Tending the wild is sometimes easier than erasing everything that’s there and starting from scratch… it does all the farming for you.”
This is a story about natural building, yes—but also about something deeper: emancipation from debt, from high-energy living, and from a life spent earning money just to hand it straight back over to the system.
Because, as he says: “It’s actually the whole possibility of emancipation from labor… If I don’t have a 20-year loan, that’s 20 years less of my life that I have to work.”
We visited on a freezing winter day, and were welcomed into his warm, cozy home—heated only by a few logs burned the night before. He made our family lunch from his foraged, grown, and preserved foods, and it felt like the whole philosophy in one meal: simple, local, deeply satisfying.
If you’re curious about earth-and-straw construction, off-grid systems, permaculture, wild foods, or what it really takes to live with less—this one is a full, grounded tour. If you enjoy these deep dives into people quietly building real alternatives, consider subscribing—and let me know in the comments: what part of this life feels most possible for you, and what feels hardest to imagine?