On the site of a former brickworks in rural Wiltshire, London-based architecture practice Tuckey Design Studio has built a house from the ground it stands on, compressing on-site clay and the rubble of demolished 1990s additions into unstabilised rammed-earth walls up to a metre thick (3.3 feet). The studio worked with a multi-disciplinary team, appointed from the outset, to determine how the technique could support a full-scale residence without the cement or lime stabilisers rammed earth construction usually calls for. The result makes the case that a method dating to the Neolithic era can still perform at the scale and permanence a contemporary country house demands.
A former brickworks itself, the 63-acre Wiltshire property carried a documented history of material drawn from the ground long before the current owners acquired it. Research into the site — including reference to William Smith’s 1815 geological map of England — confirmed the grounds sat within an area of clay-rich soil, inside an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty now termed National Landscape. “While designing their house in London, before they even bought the land, we began conversations with our clients about creating a house that redefined all traditional concepts of the English country house — how to embrace nature, maximise views, and immerse the house in its landscape but with interiors that are as interesting as they are comfortable,” said Emily Todhunter, co-founder of Todhunter Earle Interiors.
Demolition became material rather than waste. Apart from a few Victorian brick cottages, which were retained and retrofitted, the existing buildings were demolished, and the resulting aggregate was combined with excavated clay to form the raw material for the home’s monolithic walls — a strategy that echoes the reduced-embodied-carbon thinking behind O’Sullivan Skoufoglou’s Canonbury retrofit, though applied here to new-build construction. “We didn’t need to bring many materials to site. Instead, we turned the site into a quarry; digging, drying and sifting the clay,” said Jonathan Tuckey.
Six months of testing preceded construction, with the site itself functioning as a laboratory for the team, including Austrian rammed-earth specialist Martin Rauch of Lehm Ton Erde. The studio deliberately avoided cement and lime stabilisers common in rammed earth today, aiming for a rarer, more circular unstabilised rammed earth approach that would let the house belong materially to its setting rather than merely resemble it.
A 25/25/25/25 ratio of clay, crushed-brick demolition aggregate, locally sourced limestone gravel, and water became the settled composition. Walls were built in layers within formwork, compressed manually by builders walking the top with a rammer — a construction method with no comparable precedent at this scale in the United Kingdom.
Walls up to a metre thick (3.3 feet) — capable, when designed well, of extending over a hundred metres (328 feet) without movement joints — cradle bedrooms, snugs and nooks, while opening into carved benches and object niches recalling the poches of a medieval castle. A casein coating finishes the interior surfaces, protecting the aggregate and creating a reflective, terrazzo-like texture underfoot.
A shared reading of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows shaped the interior sensibility, paired with limestone, oak, clay plaster and copper accents. “There is an elemental beauty to rammed earth construction. It’s all encompassing; its thick walls and monolithic character presenting architectural opportunities at every turn. The rammed earth layers expose the labour of ‘making’ like geological human time,” said Emaad Damda, Associate Architect at Tuckey Design Studio.
Framed views rather than a single vantage point structure the experience of the Wiltshire pasture outside, with windows punched through the thick walls to reveal the landscape gradually. Two rammed-earth volumes connect via a kitchen and dining pavilion, its timber-and-glass construction contrasting with the monumental walls and opening onto courtyards shaped by garden designer Pip Morrison — a material-versus-landscape tension not unlike the way Green Lodge by Stylus Architects lets its larch cladding weather into the ground it sits within.
A more contestable claim embedded in Rammed Earth House is that unstabilised earth construction remains rare in the UK not because it underperforms, but because an industry accustomed to concrete and steel has yet to build the testing infrastructure and confidence the technique requires at scale — a gap this project, rather than any regulation, appears to close.
Rammed Earth House by Tuckey Design Studio | Location: Wiltshire, UK — Year: 2024 — Key materials: unstabilised rammed earth (clay, demolition aggregate, limestone gravel), oak, limestone, clay plaster, copper