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I stayed in a house in Germany in which the walls were filled with dried-straw for insulation. It was several hundred years old. There was a no-smoking rule.

• atoav 7y ago
  > There was a no-smoking rule. Which to be honest says not a lot about anything, because this isn't that unusual in Central Europe. Also: a lot of the old wooden houses are far better in terms of fire resistance than you'd suspect on first glance, wood often outperforms concrete and steel when it comes to structural integrity in a fire. I don't know about the straw thing, I only know it mixed with clay.
  • _jal 7y ago
    The no-smoking bit was me being a bit, ah, dry. Sorry it didn't come across better. The home in question belonged to the extended family of my host family while I was an exchange student. I went with them to a maintenance day and did wallpaper. I got a very close look at the walls, not to mention the repeated lectures on what a firetrap it was. Trust me, it was.
• noodlesUK 7y ago
  I have a similar anecdote. The walls of the main building at my university were full of hay and paraffin wax. This is in the UK. We were very conscious of fire safety there...
• modriano 7y ago
  For about the last 20 years of my life as an American, 99.9% of all buildings I enter have a no-smoking rule. The only exceptions have been bars in kind of backwards places that I've had to go on business, like Jacksonville, FL.