SHIRAKAWA, Gifu Prefecture--Villagers in this renowned UNESCO World Heritage site came together to re-thatch the roof of a multitiered house here for the first time in five years on May 13. The ...

GRASPING AT STRAWS is all the rage among a growing number of British homeowners, as Mark Phillips now shows us: When it comes to housing design, it's hard to get more retro than this: a thatched roof, ...

How does a thatch roof work and why don’t they leak? When visiting northern Uganda last week, I asked a wise soul, whose name was Francis, how a thatch roof actually worked. Francis’s nephew, Erick, ...

In England and Denmark, there are still entire villages of thatched houses. While it is expensive to thatch a roof in those countries, it is not prohibitively so, and the tradition of thatching is ...

This is especially sad because thatch used to be the standard roofing material in Japan. It was used not only on farmhouses, but on the country's grandest buildings. For example, the most important ...