Who We Are
Healthy Home Artisans is a Design & Build licensed contracting firm specializing in natural and sustainable materials for our built environments. We focus on better building for our health, the planet and future generations. The industries of construction and built environments are one of the top contributors to our current climate and planet crisis. Our goal is to contribute to the construction industry with building practices that promote safety, health, durability, comfort and beauty. Our firm focuses on design that is site and climate specific, construction that utilizes locally sourced and carbon sequestering natural materials that create high performance built environments.
We offer a wide array of services within the ecological building realm. Services include; design, architectural drafting, consultations and building from the groundwork to the finishes. We also specialize in green renovations, tiny homes, natural plasters, paints and finishes, natural fencing, outdoor kitchens, saunas, out houses, green ADUs, salvage restoration, reclaimed materials and so much more. Ecological Building is creating and sustaining mutually beneficial relationships with all of the elements of its local ecology. In order to commit to building in this manner, we promote the collaboration between design and build. Every project is unique to its site, its climate and its inhabitants, therefore it will always be a holistic union of all systems coming together to create.
Healthy Home Artisans is a union between Amanda Fischer and Myles Danforth who met on a building site for a mutual colleague’s strawbale and straw-clay project. Both have backgrounds in architecture, engineering and sustainable communities. We are licensed contractors in California and Oregon.
Amanda Fischer is the founder and organizer of Muddy Hands and co-owner of Healthy Home Artisans Inc. She is a designer, drafter, teacher, builder, project manager, adventurer, traveler and avid learner! Amanda has been designing, building and teaching conscious and sustainable structures for over 8 years. Prior to this, she attended university and holds a Masters of Architecture with a focus on Interior Architecture & Design and Minor in Business. She taught as an Instructor in universities on the east coast prior to moving to Northern California where she obtained a certification as a Sustainable Building Advisor in San Francisco. This certification guides her in promoting sustainability through all stages of our built environments. It also guided her to passionately dive into the Natural Building industry which she has been specifically focused on for the last years. Upon diving into the natural building realm, she has had the pleasure of learning from and co-instructing with Michael Smith author of the Hand Sculpted House. She volunteered her time learning as much as she could during the beginning stages of her journey and has ambitiously embarked on teaching and building with these amazing natural building techniques. Amanda has worked on structures throughout Northern California and Thailand; teaching these skills to all enthusiasts that come her way.
Amanda’s passion focuses on the art of empowerment through the use of natural and renewable materials to create spaces. As an ever evolving teacher, builder and designer Amanda focuses on creating built environments that inspire deeper relationships with the land, habitat and home by utilizing natural and locally sourced materials to create spirit filled spaces! Education and community are extremely important to her; she continues to teach workshops in California and beyond spreading the love and knowledge that reconnects us and home.
Working with natural materials since childhood has given Myles extensive awareness of how our built environments affect our surrounding. Myles has over a decade of hands on experience in alternative building. Born and raised in the central valley of Northern California, he has witnessed firsthand the rapid and un-natural expansion of residential construction. Having graduated from DaVinci a New Technology problem-based learning high school in Davis, CA only intensified the understanding of unsustainable and unhealthy homes being built by the tens of thousands.
Becoming deeply intrigued by the accord of nature, Myles pursued botany, environmental engineering, and natural resource sciences at the University of Humboldt graduating in 2012 with a B.S. in Interdisciplinary Studies titled ‘Sustainable Communities’ with a minor in Appropriate Technology and Native American Studies. While attending Humboldt State Myles became intensely involved with CCAT (Campus Center for Appropriate Technology) as a volunteer turned employee turned co-director, routing questions and answers across countries about sustainable living and taught college courses in the same vein while also pursuing credentials in Permaculture courses.
Since college Myles lead a life of travel throughout Central America gaining skills and wisdom from the indigenous peoples of Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Mexico and volunteered with non-profits Like Long Way Home and various Permaculture based farming communities.
After returning to the U.S. with newfound methods for adapting the ancient ways of living to the western world Myles obtained a contractor’s license in Oregon and founded Reclamations Natural Building Inc, undertaking numerous projects in natural construction from 2014 – 2018.
With the draw of home and family in Northern California, Myles returned to gain licensure as a general contractor in California and partner up with talented natural builders like Amanda Fischer with the goal of creating systems of alternative ecological construction for the benefit and access of all people. Myles continues to this day to find simple alternatives to the conventional assumptions of building practices.
It is said that life and love begin at home, a place of safety and wellness, a temple to you and yours; should this place not only keep you sheltered but also healthy and with a sense of well being that comes from being surrounded in materials that come to us from the natural world with minimal processing so that we may live closer to harmony with nature.