New Frameworks

New Frameworks is a worker cooperative in Essex Junction, Vermont that manufactures straw-insulated wall panels and sells them as prefab kits. It has been employee-owned since 2016, confirmed by the Vermont Employee Ownership Center rather than only by the firm, and it no longer builds custom homes from the ground up. The current work is panel manufacturing, a six-model kit line called Casita running from a 300 sq ft office to a 1,200 sq ft house, design consulting, weatherization and ventilation retrofits, and a training program that has spun up sister straw-panel cooperatives in Massachusetts, Missouri and elsewhere.

The material specification is unusually traceable. The straw is organic and comes from the Nitty Gritty Grain Company in Charlotte, Vermont, roughly twenty miles from the shop, installed without binders or treatments — a detail Efficiency Vermont independently confirms. It is dense-packed to about nine pounds per cubic foot inside double-stud frames, which makes it loose-fill straw insulation rather than compressed bales or a supercompressed panel, and that distinction changes how the assembly behaves. Floors and roofs use wood fiber instead. Interiors are finished in hand-applied clay and lime plaster, chosen for humidity buffering. Foundations sit on helical piers rather than concrete, and they name the reason: concrete is the most carbon-intensive material in construction.

Two things they do that the category mostly doesn't. They publish prices — Casita kits run from $58,900 to $152,500, with installation quoted at $15 to $24 per square foot. And they state the limits of their own material unprompted: straw supports good drying potential in a well-designed assembly, but cannot tolerate being wet for extended periods. Their ventilation logic is right too, which is less common in natural building than it should be. Because an airtight house requires mechanical ventilation, the kits specify an ERV or HRV rather than treating breathable materials as a substitute for moving air.

The performance numbers are the weak part, and the gap matters more here than elsewhere because the whole proposition rests on the assembly. The R-38 wall value that appears across their material comes from a California Straw Building Association review concluding their panels are in line with similar European products rated at R-38 — a comparison, not a test of a New Frameworks panel. Elsewhere the same number is restated flatly, without the qualifier. The R-55 floor and R-60 roof figures are better supported, since the wood fiber carries an ICC-ES evaluation report. Their stored-carbon figure appears as both five and six kilograms of CO₂ per square foot in different places. And no blower-door result is published anywhere, which is a real absence for a company whose performance case begins with airtightness.