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A Stunning Small Home Made From Hemp

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A hemp-and-lime house outside Asheville rewrote the rules on what a wall can be made of.

Push Design’s Martin-Korp Residence, finished in 2010 in the hills near Asheville, North Carolina, wasn’t built to be quaint. It was built to prove that a full-size family home could go up without a single synthetic sealant, foam panel, or off-gassing adhesive — and still pass code. The result became the first permitted hempcrete residence in the United States.

• The home, designed by Anthony Brenner and David Mosrie for former Asheville mayor Russ Martin and writer Karon Korp, spans roughly 3,000 to 3,400 square feet plus a garage — not the 780-square-foot cabin often described, and it was built at a cost of about $133 per square foot.
• Its walls use Tradical Hemcrete, a hemp hurd-lime-water mix packed in 12-inch-thick lifts around wood framing, delivering R-2 to R-2.5 insulation value per inch while absorbing CO2 as it cures.
• Because U.S. federal law barred domestic industrial hemp farming at the time, the hemp itself had to be shipped in from the United Kingdom by Hemp Technologies and American Lime Technology.

Brenner Selects Hemp Over Airtight Envelopes

Anthony Brenner’s interest in non-toxic building wasn’t theoretical. His daughter, Bailey, has a severe genetic disorder that triggers seizures when she’s exposed to synthetic chemicals. Rather than build the kind of sealed, high-performance envelope that traps volatile organic compounds released by furniture and finishes, Brenner and Mosrie went the opposite direction: a wall system designed to breathe.

That decision is the entire premise of the house. Hempcrete doesn’t just insulate — it regulates moisture, resists mold and pests, carries real thermal mass, and holds up against fire far better than conventional framing. For a family managing a medical condition tied to indoor air quality, that combination mattered more than R-value on a spec sheet.

The Hemcrete Wall System, Lift by Lift

Construction crews packed Tradical Hemcrete around the wood studs in 12-inch-thick lifts, letting the lime-hemp mixture cure and, over time, petrify while absorbing carbon dioxide from the air. The wall assembly reads almost like a living material rather than a static one.

The hemp-lime mixture yields an insulating value of R-2 to R-2.5 per inch, resists mold and pests, and provides high thermal mass and fire resistance.

Inside, the partitions skip drywall entirely in favor of Purepanel — a lightweight, toxin-free composite built around recycled paper cores and skinned in magnesium oxide. The interior doors, at 8 feet tall, weigh just 12 pounds apiece, a detail that sounds trivial until you’re the one hanging them.

Salvaged Glass and a 21 SEER Heat Pump

Push Design didn’t source everything new. Thirty salvaged window frames were retrofitted with high-efficiency glass and worked back into the design, cutting waste while keeping the home’s daylighting intact. Paired with a 21 SEER air-source heat pump, the thermal mass of the hempcrete walls does enough of the work that monthly cooling costs stay under $100 — a notable number for a house north of 3,000 square feet in North Carolina summer humidity.

For anyone comparing build methods on cost and performance, it’s worth stacking hempcrete against other alternative structures, the way builders profiled in this metal-house cost breakdown weigh steel against wood framing, or against the custom-build math laid out in this kit-home project.

Importing a Crop the Law Wouldn’t Let Grow at Home

The most striking logistical detail of the whole project has nothing to do with architecture. At the time the Martin-Korp Residence was built, federal law strictly restricted industrial hemp farming in the U.S., so Hemp Technologies and American Lime Technology had to import the raw hemp from the United Kingdom just to pour the walls of an American house.

That single fact framed the entire build: a house designed to solve a domestic health problem, made possible only by a supply chain that had to cross the Atlantic first.