fter meeting in Isla Mujeres in Mexico five years ago, Tove Eklöf and Flavio Christensen’s love for nature and adventure has them embarking on a new journey together—building their eco-friendly home in Argentina.
“When we met five years ago, we decided to go traveling together through Latin America. We traveled through 10 countries together for a year-and-a-half before we reached Argentina. There wasn’t really a plan from the beginning that we would settle in the little town where Flavio grew up, but as Flavio needed to go back to be with his mother, we decided to come here together and keep building the house that he had already started on some years earlier,” says Eklöf, who is originally from Sweden.
The home is in the centre of Ingeniero Maschwitz, a small suburban town in the north of Buenos Aires. The town is surrounded by wetlands, creeks, farms, and big eucalyptus and pine trees.
“Here, we have a bit of a bohemian vibe among the people that live in the town. It’s full of cultural activities like yoga, dance, art, and music,” says Eklöf.
When they came to Argentina in 2017, they continued building upon the home that Flavio had started constructing a few years before, after learning about bio-construction and eco-bricks.
Eco-bricks are plastic bottles full of garbage that work as building blocks and insulation inside of walls. They’re made by packing dry, clean plastic bottles to a set density. The couple collected 400 bottles by the time they returned to Argentina to start building their walls.
“We chose to use recycled materials for two reasons. One: our interest in using recycled materials came from traveling to many places. We’ve both seen the possibilities to build by using different techniques. Second, was the budget. We didn’t have much money to build a house, but realized this way would be very economical.”
They used a mixed method to build the walls of the house. They began with simple construction using wood. Inside that, they put all of the plastic bottles, with help from steel wire and fencing that they found on the streets. They then used the method called cob building, where the earth has been through a  process of fermenting with horse dung and then is mixed with dried grass. In order to get the cob to attach to the walls, they used nails set into the wood structure to make sure the surface they worked on was wet for the earth to set.
Putting the home together has also been a community effort, with Flavio’s friends donating things like dirt and recycled wood.

“The decoration of the house also has a lot of recycled things—artwork that we bought in different corners of the world, made ourselves, or gifts from friends. The kitchen bench is made out of recycled wood, and some of the kitchen shelves by wood boxes found in the street. The kitchen sink is a recycled gift from a friend. Even our kitchen chairs, we recycled and changed the fabric part with the help from a friend. Our couch comes from another friend’s grandmother.”
The roof of the kitchen and living room area is made of plastic, which allows light to shine into the home. A big avocado tree covers the house from the hot sun in the summer.“We can see the branches sway and little birds walking on the roof if we look up.” 

The home can get quite cold in the winter, so they have a wood burning stove that a friend built for them, made from an old water tank.
Along with a vegetable garden, animals like chickens, rabbits, turtles, and different birds come to visit and make themselves at home in the garden.
The process of building the home together has shaped their view of what home means. “It has changed our view of the possibilities to build your own home. It can be more simple than we might have thought from the beginning. Also, it can be a very playful process, with lots of imagination involved.”

Christensen and Eklöf want to continue to collect more eco-bricks and travel again, potentially to Africa, to start a new project and learn more bio-construction techniques. They plan to start crowdfunding to support the new project.
“The connection to home for us who really love and care for nature is to be able to find a harmonic way for humans to live with nature and not apart from it. That way we can reuse things that otherwise would be thrown out and cultivate a community to help each other to make our homes.”

Roohi Sahajpal is a freelance writer and journalist. She is also a co-founder of Didihood, a collective for South Asian women in Canada who work in creative industries. She is based in Vancouver.