Alabama is not usually confused with England. But that could change.
This story begins in 1978 in the English countryside, where a Selma-born architecture student named Bobby McAlpine came across stone houses roofed with thatch—reeds or straw tied tightly together. “Previously, illustrations and films had suggested they existed in some mythical realm,” he recalls. When he saw them in person, “my heart nearly beat out of my chest.” This spurred McAlpine’s lifelong passion for the unique combination of “the ephemeral and the permanent” of a thatched roof. Yet even though he became as influential as any American architect not named Wright, he could not convince any of his clients to try thatch.
Ben Shepard, McAlpine’s former student at Auburn’s architecture school, attributes clients’ reluctance to the misconception that “thatch costs even more than slate and it can easily blow away or catch fire.” Shepard and McAlpine could have told them that a thatch can actually last seventy years, making it cost-effective, and that its density prevents fires—and that it also provides superior insulation. Still, clients balked. “Thatch is a poetic choice,” McAlpine admits, and it requires “the rare client who is willing to go that deep into a vulnerable material that has no warranty.”
In 1999, McAlpine finally found such a client: the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. The resulting 300-seat amphitheater in Montgomery—a timber-framed structure with no nails, true to Shakespeare’s time and, yes, with a thatched roof—was a resounding proof of concept that enabled McAlpine to convince several of his clients of the material.
But unfortunately only for cabanas and verandas.
The amphitheater designed for the Alabama Shakespeare Festival at Blount Cultural Park.
But he also inspired other architects, including his former student Shepard. In 2015, a client came to Birmingham-based architectural firm Shepard & Davis with the intention of transforming a 12-by-18-metre cattle barn in nearby Chelsea into a habitat for people and animals. Nestled in a sheep-strewn meadow from a Brothers Grimm fairytale, the barn reminded Shepard of two of McAlpine’s sayings: Integrate a house into its surroundings And just because you can be loud with your design doesn’t mean you have to be. It goes without saying that Shepard did not propose a brutalist monolith of glass and chrome with a hayloft. Instead, he and his partner Darla Davis proposed a modest design, essentially a steep-roofed version of a Monopoly hotel. Its beauty, they believed, lay in the simple materials that could theoretically be sourced from the site, and would make it blend harmoniously into the rural setting. A thatched roof, which softened the building’s silhouette while giving it visual weight, was paramount.
The barn in Chelsea, Alabama.
To do this, they needed an experienced roofer. Luckily, Scottish master Colin McGhee had moved to America in 1991 (for a girl, of course), although demand for gutters was low outside of the odd tiki bar. He set up shop in Virginia and found work here and there, including at an Irish pub in New Jersey, later named Thatcher McGhee’s in recognition of his efforts.
Because of Alabama’s humidity, McGhee recommended that Shepard and Davis use Turkish reeds, which had to be imported from Turkey. He needed 6 acres for the standard 12-inch-thick roof. In addition, after the reeds cleared customs, the moisture-retaining leaves had to be removed. He and his assistant would then attach bundles of reeds to the rafters, shaping them with knives and two-pronged pitchforks while simultaneously compacting them with a hammer-like leggett until each cubic foot weighed eight pounds. The work would take a month.
A thatched roof tower that once stood in Blount Park in Montgomery, Alabama.
Turkish water reed, Shepard and Davis learned, is prized for its honey-brown color, uniform girth (about the size of a drinking straw), and strength, which in its native soil is unaffected by the nitrates found in modern fertilizers. It is also waterproof and drains rainwater on roofs so efficiently that gutters are unnecessary. Unfortunately, the architects thought, it would cost more than gold.
As it turned out, it was only slightly more expensive than cedar. The client agreed, and the renovation, completed in May 2016, delighted everyone involved, especially supporters of sustainable construction. McGhee and his reeds were soon in demand on ten more roofs in Alabama, including a property on Lake Martin that finally belonged to a McAlpine client willing to go all thatch: McAlpine himself. That project, in turn, led to more thatch roofs across the country.
McGhee is currently working on the former Beverly Hills home of silent film star Harold Lloyd, and given the reaction of locals and their penchant for the latest trends, Alabama can claim to have been way ahead of the game on this one.
