For our first ever Talking Shop episode, HML Director Alison Mears spoke with Hempitecture co-founder and CEO Mattie Mead.
Based in Ketchum, ID, Hempitecture built the United States’ first public use hemp building as well as many private residences. Along with his co-founder, Mattie was on the 2020 Forbes list of 30 under 30 in manufacturing and industry. Mattie and his partners at Hempitecture hosted the first US Hemp Building Summit in 2019. Listen now to hear his exciting and innovative take on building with hemp!
For our first ever Talking Shop episode, HML Director Alison Mears spoke with Hempitecture co-founder and CEO Mattie Mead.
Based in Ketchum, ID, Hempitecture built the United States’ first public use hemp building as well as many private residences. Along with his co-founder, Mattie was on the 2020 Forbes list of 30 under 30 in manufacturing and industry. Mattie and his partners at Hempitecture hosted the first US Hemp Building Summit in 2019. Listen now to hear his exciting and innovative take on building with hemp!
Ava: We set out this season to tell the story of hemp: to dig into its history, what it's meant to our culture, how it affects our bodies and especially how it can be
used as a building product. Now that we've gotten to the point in the story
where we're talking to people who are actually building with hemp, we're
changing the style of conversation. Instead of telling an overarching story, we
want to delve into the details with folks who are doing this work every day.
Welcome to Trace Material: Talking Shop.
Ava: In this episode, Parsons Healthy Materials Lab director Alison Mears will be talking to Mattie Mead, who is the CEO and founder of Hempitecture. Based in Ketchum, Idaho, the company built the United States' first public use hemp
building as well as many private residences. Along with his co-founder, Mattie
was on the 2020 Forbes list of 30 Under 30 in Manufacturing and Industry.
Mattie and his partners at Hempitecture hosted the first US Hemp Building
Summit in 2019. Keep listening to hear Mattie's exciting and innovative take on the hemp building industry.
Alison Mears: Hi, Mattie. How are you?
Mattie Mead: Oh, so good to see you again. I'm great.
Alison Mears: Yeah. Great to see you too. Yeah, I was thinking back, I was trying to think when we first met each other, I mean, we've known each other for a year or so. Over a year, right?
Mattie Mead: Yeah. I think we were in contact a little bit before the Hemp Building Summit, but that was the first time we got to meet you out here in Sun Valley last
October.
Alison Mears: Yeah. Fantastic. So we've been -- we're long-term friends now. Mattie Mead: Yes, exactly.
Alison Mears: So today we're going to, we're really interested in understanding your insights about why building with hemplime is important, and why and how hemplime
can become a viable industry in the US. So that's a kind of framing context for
our conversation today. So I have some questions to ask you, and we really kind of want to understand first about your firsthand experience working in this
space. So the first question is, can you tell us about your first hands-on
experience with hemp and lime?
Mattie Mead: My first hands-on experience with hemp and lime was not long after I graduated college and actually is how I ended up in Sun Valley, Ketchum, Idaho area, and
while my business is still based here today. When I was a senior studying
architecture in college, I was minoring in environmental studies and just was
enamored at the idea of natural building materials. I was relatively unfamiliar
with hemplime until I did a research project. And I did this research project on
vernacular archetypes and thought to myself, what a missed opportunity in the United States to work with this material. They're working with it in Europe,
Australia. So all these examples and imagine the benefits of it. And at that point it was kind of theoretical and conceptual and part of a school project. But I was so enamored with it that I kept talking about it and I was competing in these
business plan competitions and was reached out to someone who owned a
property in Idaho for a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
Mattie Mead: And they asked if I would be interested in coming out to Idaho to work on a hempcrete building project and the way that they kind of framed it was we
want our property to be a sort of laboratory for natural building techniques. So I, it was a very unique opportunity in that they were open to new ideas. They
hadn't particularly heard of working with hemplime prior, but it came up in a
news article and they said, wow, wouldn't that be cool? At the time they were
working on a cordwood cottage, which is a different kind of natural building
technique. And they had ideas of doing rammed earth and, and all sorts of
different strategies that you demonstrate different ways of building with the
earth. But likewise, you know, they were enamored with hemplime, as I was and asked me to visit, I'd do one look at the property which is high mountain desert, sage brush view of the tallest mountain in Idaho, right on a river. And I said,
okay, I have to be a part of this project and was able to approach it from a
design build, which was really great because being an architecture student, you really have this experience of working through process, working through
drawings and developing concepts, and to be able to work in the architecture
studio, and then see those concepts be developed and refined, and then
ultimately implemented. It was a really rewarding experience.
Alison Mears: It's such a great story for young architects and architecture students to actually hear about that transition from school into practice so quickly. And in such a,
kind of interesting area. How did they hear about the work that you were doing in your undergraduate degree?
Mattie Mead: When I was a senior, I had started in 2012, started the concept of Hempitecture, which at the time was very different than Hempitecture is today. It actually
started with a building block concept. It was a, a product development concept. And in these business plan competitions, I was pitching this to, you know, crowd full of people, investors. Keep in mind industrial hemp was not legal at the time. Inevitably I was laughed at, but I did have some success. I was in kind of the top three of every business plan competition I was in, but it just seems so far away. It seems so far fetched for the people that were, you know, evaluating the
business planning competition. And with each business plan competition, there would be a news article or something that was shared. And, interestingly, one of my closest friends became my competitor in a business plan competition.
Mattie Mead: And we had worked, you know, really closely together on developing each other's concepts and supporting each other entrepreneurially. And, fortunately for him, he won this business plan competition. He posted an article on
Facebook and it's the– kind of goes to show the power of social media. This
individual from Idaho who owned this nonprofit organization, had a family
friendship with this person and they saw the article and they called me and they said, "Hey, we saw that article. You didn't win that business plan competition"
"Uh, no, I, I did not." And they're like, "we know the guy who did." "That's great. He's my, he's my friend. I'm, you know, definitely happy for him." They're like,
"we think that's really cool, but we love what you're doing and we want you to bring this idea to our property." And I think it's important to kind of set the
scene for where the building is placed.
Mattie Mead: The nonprofit organization is dedicated towards connecting individuals to nature. Buildings, in their mind, and I agree with this notion, should be an
extension of nature, should be harmonious with nature. And so that's the story of how they found me. It was very serendipitous and actually at the time I was
in St. John in the US Virgin Islands doing eco building there. Again, in that idea of going from architectural process to, you know, drawing small scale model
making. That was my first time really hands-on making really hands-on building. And so when they had reached out to me and asked if I'd be interested in
coming to Idaho, there was not a doubt in my mind. I had just started to realize my passion for making, for creating, for cutting, for building, for seeing things
come together. And so traveling to Idaho was a natural extension of that.
Alison Mears: That's so interesting. I was going to ask you, that would be a follow-up question is like transitioning from school to practice as an architect is, you know,
beginning to understand what it means to create and document your ideas, and then go through the process of somebody else, usually building your ideas, but you've been involved in the, both the conception and the creation of buildings
from a very early kind of time. And so how did you acquire this knowledge of
what it means to work with hemp and lime?
Mattie Mead: Well, that's a great question. And I was very fortunate in that my first opportunity to work with hemp and lime was, uh, they were very open-minded to it being a prototype, and they were very aware that we were going to be
trying something that we had really only done on a small scale before. So in a
sense, they created sort of a safe space for experimentation and development, which I think is relatively uncommon in this world. And it can be difficult to
bridge that gap between, you know, you're a student who's learning, and you go out into the real world, how, you know, what does that process look like?
Sometimes it, you don't have the ability to learn on the fly or learn as you go.
But I think being uncomfortable, and being pushed and challenged can
accelerate that process.
Mattie Mead: It can make that transition easier. And I had realized that in this first architectural experience of going from, you know, thinking about things on a
small scale to, wow, we're thinking about a building. How has plumbing going to incorporate that? I had never thought about plumbing before. How is wiring
going to incorporate with this material? So there were so many things that were so, for us, unknown at the time that working through those and being
challenged by those really kind of, I would say pushed along our understanding
of how to work with the material. But to a certain extent, I realized that there
was much, much more to learn. And it was in going through the process of being an architecture student to then working with my hands and creating in the field. And that I realized you don't really know what you don't know until you know it.
Mattie Mead: And I actually got a second job at the time of my first building project working for a conventional custom construction company. We were doing high-end
residential framing and the area that I live is sort of a resort community in some areas. So I have the ability to work with really sophisticated architectural plans and understand how conventional buildings are currently being built. With that understanding of how are current, how are current buildings being built, you
can apply something new or something different to that. So long as you
understand the basic premise. And I went to work every day, working a really
physically demanding job with the understanding that at the end of the day, I'm learning something new and I will be able to apply hempcrete and hemplime to this concept of conventional traditional building. So it was definitely a rough
period in terms of my professional development. I wouldn't say it was easy. I
was challenged greatly, but I think embracing that challenge really brings you to a place where you're able to be that professional that you hope to be, but
there's always learning process.
Alison Mears: Yeah. It's such a perfect journey for an architect to both understand the kind of object, objective, idealistic, conceptual part of the work, and then to compare it to what it actually means in practice on the ground, in the mud, with the
framing and, and all of that. So it's such a great journey, I think, for young
architects to have, and for you as a young architect to have that kind of
experience. So what are you working on today with hemp and lime, Mattie?
Mattie Mead: We have a number of projects that we've been working on, advising as well as supplying. Outside of, you know, fulfilling, you know, construction project needs using hemplime, we've really been focusing on education. The reason that we're focusing on education is because we've realized that there needs to be more
people who are well-versed in the trade of hempcrete. There are more people
who won't have that same experience that I had, where I got to have a low risk environment, and they want to learn where to begin. And that's where kind of
our contractor training program comes in. For the last six months we've been
bringing people to our location in Idaho based on an application process and
giving them a four day immersive experience and what it means to work with
hemplime.
Mattie Mead: What's the equipment that you need? How do you protect yourself? How do, what are the personal safety measures that you need when working with
hemplime, and what are the techniques that you make an efficient and effective install? For the last few years, I've more or less lived in multiple places across
the United States using my current location as a home base. But it was basically like, "have hempcrete, will travel." You know, whoever would be interested in
building a hempcrete structure, I would, I would travel there. I would sacrifice a lot to be in a place for six months to a year or two years. That was great. And I,
you know, that was a formative experience for me, but why not share that
knowledge with others who can then maybe respond to the desire for these
building projects in their communities, who can be resources in different
locations to accelerate this. Because I truly do believe if hempcrete and building with hemplime, doesn't reach scale, the environmental impacts that are so
potentially profound can't be realized. It is an incredible thing that hemplime
absorbs, stores, sequesters carbon dioxide, lends to healthy energy efficient
habitats. But that should be made more accessible. It can only be made more
accessible by more people working with it. And the more people that work with it, the more demand there will be for materials, which hopefully will make it a
less specialty product, less niche artisanal product, and be something that can
be more widely implemented.
Alison Mears: So I understand that you've got some high profile clients. Now, one particular client you are posting on Instagram. I noticed the other day, you want to talk
about that project a little bit? That's seems like an exceptional project and an
exceptional client.
Mattie Mead: Yeah. So about last October, right before our Hemp Building Summit, I went to a project site to basically build a mock-up wall. It wasn't super certain who the
client was, or didn't really know much about, I didn't know much about the
client team. They had asked me to, you know, build a mock up, demonstrate
how hemplime integrates with a wall assembly. And I, I didn't fully grasp and
realize that at the time, I was doing this sort of small scale project to be
evaluated by a Belgian architecture company Mood Architecture and Axel
Vervoodt, a very renowned interior designer. Upon that realization, it was kind of like, wow, what a, what a dream come true. That I'm able to do something
that I've been working towards that I, you know, I love the craft, I appreciate the craft, and that my work was going to be examined by such well-respected
individuals in the architecture and design communities.
Mattie Mead: And so the project itself is really unique and exciting. It's a Minka barn, which is the Japanese, architect for post and beam. The client team selected a barn in
Japan, which was built probably 350 to 400 years ago. They disassembled it and sent it to this project location where they had a team of Japanese carpenters
come and put together the frame. Such an amazing experience. And also, I think back to my time as an architecture student, we did a segment on Japanese
joinery. We looked at the sophisticated ways in which would, could be joined
together without fasteners, without nails. And it was very influential to me to
have that experience and understanding of there's such a craft towards
carpentry and working with timber. And then to later on be involved with a
project that utilizes and incorporates that same Japanese joinery, it really is a
dream come true.
Mattie Mead: And I play a very small part in a project that is being quarterbacked by some really great, incredible architectural visionaries. Mood Architecture, Axel
Vervoodt, as well as Mell Lawrence Architects, who are the local architects
advising and developing the plans on the project. They've been all incredible to
work with. And they have made my job of supplying insight and sequencing
ideas of how hemplime will integrate with this structure. They've made it easy
for me. And so I'm very thankful to them and also very appreciative of the
opportunity to participate in such an awesome project.
Alison Mears: It's so wild, such a beautiful, it sounds like such a beautiful project. I can't wait to see photographs and, you know, understand the sequencing of it and then
see the final product. Great. So tell us what, what is it about hemp that keeps
you up at night? Is there anything?
Mattie Mead: There's a lot of things that keep me up at night and it's always, usually in regards to my business, how can we reach more people? How can we make this a more accessible material and strategy? How can we grow our customer list? How can we convince skeptics who are initially unsupportive or skeptical? How can we
convince them that this is a viable, healthy, alternative? This is an alternative
that can lend to healthier homes, healthier communities, healthier families,
healthier individuals. You know, we've founded ourselves as a public benefit
corporation because we so strongly believe that what we're doing benefits, both people and planet. So thinking of ways to maximize that, to further our mission and impact more projects, more people, more communities. That's what keeps me up at night.
Alison Mears: So you're not too concerned about the drying time of hemp and lime, or whether that wall is going to be as perfect as it could be. You're all set with all of that.
Mattie Mead: No, there's always those little things, but I am such a believer in the material and have gotten to experiment with it. And now incorporate it into probably
over 15 projects and structures across the United States that I believe in it so
much. There's always as a craftsmen, as someone who works with the material, desire to perfect your ways. And that's a whole other conversation. That that's what also keeps me up at night, but maybe on alternating nights of the week. I definitely have had my fair share of hemplime dreams, where I imagine I'm
installing material on a project and what if we did this differently, or what if we did that differently? But at the end of the day, it's all learning process. It's all
learning experience. And that collection and compilation of experiences is
something that we hope to share with people and help spread and grow this
building strategy.
Alison Mears: That's great. So if you think about kind of your dreams and nightmares that you might be having at the moment and think ahead, 10 years, what will this
industry, what will your industry, what will our industry look like in 10 years
time, do you think, or do you hope?
Mattie Mead: It's a really great question. What the industry will look like in 10 years time. And I reflect back to 2012 when I first was working on the concept of Hempitecture and imagining what 10 years from there would look like. And I can't say that it
was exactly on the mark, that idea. I do feel however that the industry is picking
up steam as a whole. I think there are more and more individuals who are
questioning how our habitats are made, how the materials that go into our
habitats impact our health, as well as the health of our earth, the health of the environment. And that sort of awakening is going to drive demand. I see the
demand increasing dramatically, and I'm not sure, I feel like we interact with 10 times more people than we did, maybe just two, three years ago.
Mattie Mead: It could be because we've been around a little bit, for a little bit and working on a number of projects, but I would prefer to believe that it's because of the
overall awareness that's growing. And people are becoming more interested in this, and it's becoming more viable, the tools, the techniques, the materials.
They're beginning to become more available closer to home. There are places
where people know how to work with hemplime now, whereas five, 10 years
ago, there was nobody. I think it's going to be an exponential growth curve.
However, it's not to be overstated how big the industry is right now. It's
incredibly small. To call it an industry as it relates to hemp building materials is almost generous. And I think we need to trend in the direction of truly believing that this can be an industry, that this is a deserving industry. It's a deserving
trade.
Mattie Mead: There needs to be the sort of framework that's applied to other building practices, other building techniques. It needs to be applied to hemplime to give it the same sort of legitimacy as other building methods have. So in 10 years, I'd like to imagine that it's recognized as a legitimate strategy. There's people in
every state who know how to build with hemplime, will there be millions of
homes built with hemplime? I'd like to think so. I'm not sure. I just know that
right now, what we need to focus on is sharing what we know, expanding our
skill sets and challenging ourselves on projects that push the boundaries, that
open the envelope, And hopefully progress this new industry along.
Alison Mears: You talked a little bit about trade. I mean, we're really interested in, in the trade, the craft. Like those two words, I think a really important words as we
think about hemp and lime. And we know, you know, that some of the
challenges of the supply chain, as we think about getting, you know, materials
that actually perform in the way that they need to, to be kind of become viable building materials. So as you think about, you think about that 10 year
timeframe, and you think about where we are now, how do you imagine we get from here to there?
Mattie Mead: I think it's, there's going to be a number of steps and a number of sort of milestones along that journey. I think one milestone that should be achieved
early on for the benefit of the industry would be examination of different
standards of evaluating and testing hemplime and biocomposites to the
available building standards that are out there. ASTM has a number of
standards. And I think that there is some work in that direction. We were
fortunate to be commissioned for an ASTM E84 test, which evaluates the smoke developed as well as the flame spread of a building material. And on that task, we were scored zero on a scale of zero to 450 with zero being the most
fireproof building material available. That's just one small sort of victory in a
series of multiple victories that is going to be required to bring this strategy to
the mainstream. That needs to happen in tandem with education.
Mattie Mead: It needs to happen in tandem with farmers growing fiber varieties with contracts in hand for someone who's going to buy it so that farmers don't get
burned and are left with biomass that could be used in building materials and
products. It's left to sit in their fields, unprocessed and unusable. There needs to be confidence from our agricultural side on the matter of industrial products
from hemp based materials. And without that, I don't think we're going to see a large agronomy for industrial hemp cultivation in the United States, which
ultimately will keep sort of the commodity costs high of the raw materials
themselves. We have to do this also in conjunction with your government
outreach. There are still states in the United States and I'm sitting in one of
them today that you cannot cultivate industrial hemp in.
Mattie Mead: With the passing of the 2018 Farm Bill, most would think that industrial hemp is fully federally legal. Well, of course it is, but there are still states who have not enacted plans. How do we move the needle in those states to ensure that your farmers and people in the processing and product development side have the
same opportunity across the United States? All these things I think are
happening. I think that we are moving towards them. I think there is progress
being made. I just think that it has to be relentless progress. It's going to be a
long time. And I think we can all play a role, whether you're a farmer or
someone who's just interested in building products or an educator, a teacher,
whomever, a trades person, you can play a role in this. And in my opinion, I
think it all does start with education. I think sharing it with one person telling
one person who might not know about it, they could tell 10 other people. They could learn more for themselves. And so I think that it just starts with us, and
that's what we can do individually to help this become the industry that we
hope it to be.
Alison Mears: We're with you on education as, you know, big believers in sharing, sharing knowledge so that everybody can be part of the process. I guess, I, you know, as we're getting towards the end of this conversation now, I'm interested in the
kind of product development piece of this as we think about construction. And we think about the standardization of products in typical construction. How do you see hemp and lime products being part of that in that, in this future that
you imagine?
Mattie Mead: That's a really great question. And I've grappled with productization from day one of Hempitecture. As I mentioned before, the foundation of Hempitecture
was based off a modular building block concept. I definitely think that there is
great validity to that. I think that nominal building devices will make hemplime more accessible, made to be more easily implementable. And I think that that is something that is coming online, but will also require scale. I think community, buyers, a market is necessary for these products to be viable. We can start to
make them, but we have to ensure that there's people to buy them. So it is, you
know, I think we're there. I think it's happening. And I think other viable
methods are panelization, prefabrication. We've worked on a few different
projects using the concept of modular panels.
Mattie Mead: That might be a way of really speeding up the timeline you had mentioned before. The idea of drying times keeping me up at night, well, panels are a great way of solving that. It does, of course require a design that incorporates panels. It's very difficult to just take a conventional design, convert it to panels. Just like it's difficult to take a conventional house and convert it to blocks. So I think we just have to have different avenues, whether it be building blocks, panels, or
cast-in-place, or spray applied that are appropriate for different uses. And I
think each project is so unique. And for us, there's been no two projects that are alike. Every project has its own set of circumstances, which dictates the
materials and the methods that you use. So I think we're there. It's exciting to
see more products come online, see more of a demand, and hopefully that
demand will drive the response to the market availability of products.
Alison Mears: There's one final question I have for you. Is there an issue or a roadblock or circumstances or something you've identified in your work that we haven't
talked about so far, that's critical for people to understand, you know, how this industry can continue to develop as we move forward?
Mattie Mead: Yeah, that's a really great question. And, you know, compliments to you because I feel like your podcast has done a great job touching on the history of the hemp industry and where we're at currently and where we're going. And I
think the hemp industry, particularly as it relates to building materials, has the
potential to, you know, bring so many different people into it from so many
different sectors. Whether you're a carpenter, labor builder, or a farmer, or a
processor, there are so many avenues for people to get involved. That I do feel that the hemp industry as a whole, as well as the focus and the building subset of that, has the potential to create a more equitable industry. And I think it's
very important that we recognize where the industry originated and the history of hemp in the United States, which again, your podcast did a great job of
covering and sort of unveiling of that.
Mattie Mead: And for me, that realization, sort of, made me realize that we need to make more of a commitment to making it an equitable industry. It has to be industry that incorporates all people. And if we look at the problems with housing and
how housing exists today, affordable housing tends to incorporate more toxic,
more affordable materials that they're used because they're cheaper. Those
materials have an impact on our health. There's no doubt about that. And
there's no doubt about, you know, affordable housing or substandard housing
impacting minorities and people of color moreso than, you know, the rest of
people. So I think that this is a step towards, if we can make this affordable, this is something that we can figure out ways to do this more efficiently. It could
have really important societal impacts and increase, you know, equity in a
society where that's something that we really need to work on.
Alison Mears: That's fantastic. Well, yeah, magic to my ears here, that last piece. Really wonderful. It's great conversation. Thank you, Mattie. Really happy to chat with you and catch up and to understand what you're doing at the moment, and
really kind of think ahead to this new future that is equitable, healthy, and
available to everyone. Thanks very much.