This is an opportunity that won’t come around too often.

The first earthship holiday home in Europe is up for sale. I wrote an article about ‘Perrine’, built in the heart of the tranquil Normandy countryside, for the Guardian last year.

It’s a three-bedroom, single storey building in the small but well-equipped village of Ger. The natural peace and quiet of the area is enhanced by the metre-thick tyre walls which insulate the building from the elements: a very relaxing place.

Kevan and Gillian Trott, who currently own the earthship, have decided to spend more time building up their new business, Earthbuilds Europe. They are planning to use the business to continue the evolution of the earthship idea more specifically for European conditions, which in general are very different from those of the arid New Mexico plains where the concept was first developed.

So if you fancy owning your very own ’ship then this is your chance.

This is an interesting and informative map application which Oliver Blake Swann at Natural Homes told me about. The map gives an overview of more than 250 different green building projects around the world, with different icons representing the different building materials and construction techniques used. There are straw bale homes, earthships and various other types of earth-based construction listed, among others, mainly in Europe and the US, but also with other projects in Africa, Australia, South America and Asia. Click on each individual icon to find out more about the project.

Channel 4’s Grand Designs recently showed an episode featuring ‘The Brittany Groundhouse’. This is what the owner of the home, Daren Howarth, called ‘an earthship-inspired’ building, though he is careful not to call it an earthship. More on this below. This was an interesting programme for me because I have met Daren a number of times, co-wrote a book about earthships (which you can now buy on Amazon) as well as writing Grand Designs Abroad with Kevin McCloud. I also wrote an article for the Guardian on the first earthship holiday home in Europe, built in Normandy.

The question of the name of the building is an interesting one. It seems as though you need the blessing of the godfather of earthships, Mike Reynolds, before you can call it such. ‘Groundhouse’ is less poetic, perhaps, but arguably more accurately descriptive.

Although Kevin McCloud wrote the foreword to the book about earthships, I know from personal conversations with him that he has always been somewhat of a sceptic about them, particularly from an aesthetic point of view. Earthships can seem rough-and-ready and aesthetically post-apocalyptic but their beauty really lies in the way they function, which is what comes first in their design. Not to mention the fact that Kevin’s love of bourgeois modernism and authentic rusticity is not everyone’s cup of tea and certainly is far from being the last word in good design.

That all sounds a bit critical but I’m glad that Kevin chose to feature an earthship on the programme as well as other ecological buildings. It will certainly help, I think, to persuade people that sustainable architecture is not really radical and ‘pioneering’. Rather it should simply be regarded as being far more common sense than the type of housing that has been commonplace in this country; housing that is poorly sited, poorly insulated and poorly designed. Housing, in other words, that is plain stupid.