GRAPHĒ: These Bamboo Tiny Homes in the Philippines Start at $15 a Square Foot

Kawayan Collective referenced a centuries-old housing style to make prefabs that are easy to build and resilient in tropical weather.

Rosanne Ceriales knew it was time for her family to find a new home. A public school teacher, she had started a new job in her hometown of Santa Catalina, on the Philippine island of Negros, and wanted to build a home that felt different than the urban concrete housing she had lived in with her husband and 11-year-old son. Concrete homes become stiflingly hot and humid during the country’s torrid summers. "Ventilation and being environmentally friendly were my main concerns," she says, wanting something that leaves a smaller carbon footprint.

So, after some research, she turned to a material her grandparents had used: bamboo. Still, she didn’t come across bamboo until seeing homes built with a technique called composite bamboo shear walls, where structural bamboo panels are held together with mesh and enveloped with cement, significantly reducing the use of concrete. Some of the homes, built in the northern Philippines, had withstood strong typhoons. "I thought, Oh, it’s also possible that these houses will be storm resistant and not easily moved by earthquakes," Ceriales says.

Bamboo has been used as a building material for centuries in Southeast Asia and South America, both of which boast dozens of native species. In the Philippines, it has traditionally been used to build small rural cottages called bahay kubo, which are breathable in humid climates and raised on stilts to avoid flooding and pests. These homes, like that of Ceriales’s grandparents, are an icon of rural areas, but they are generally bespoke. But a cooperative she found is working on a way to turn the archetype into a mass housing solution. Kawayan Collective manufactures prefabricated bamboo frames at a facility just two hours away, outside the scuba diving destination of Dauin. It was founded in 2019 by Filipino-American architect Ray Villanueva and his wife, Amy Villanueva, who left the U.S. and started building bamboo structures in the Philippines using composite bamboo shear wall technology developed by Base Bahay, a nonprofit based in Manila.