THE NEXT PHASE

The China Folk House Retreat will serve as an experiential, interactive museum showcasing the diverse folk cultures, vernacular architecture, agriculture, handicrafts, and folklife of northwest Yunnan.   Our inaugural program in the summer of  2019 was the reassembly of the timber frame of the China Folk House at its new home, the Friends Wilderness Center in Jefferson County,  West Virginia, by a team from the Timber Framers Guild in the Harpers Ferry area, high school and college students participating in an experiential work-study program, and community volunteers.  In 2020 additional groups of student and community volunteers worked through the summer and fall to enclose the house in hempcrete walls, covered with lime render.  Master Builders Jonathan Morrison and Mathieu Lamaure continue to work on designing and building the main house and other structures in the courtyard. In the future, CFHR plans to host an ongoing series of cultural exchanges and experiential education workshops with craftsmen and artists from Yunnan.

Open House and "Camp Wholesome" Reunion October 27, 2019

Rebuilding the House: June - July 2019

Rebuilding the house: summer 2020

A group of student volunteers formed a "quarantine pod" to continue work on the house over four weeks in June and July 2020.  They worked on preparing the house frame for an enclosing hempcrete wall, and then on casting the hempcrete in place--a herculean task, but satisfying and sustainable!

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More volunteers joined the effort in August and through the fall and winter, finishing the hempcrete and painstakingly covering it with a hydraulic lime render and lime wash to protect the walls.