Video reveals process behind Rammed Earth House by Tuckey Design Studio

There's something about standing on earth, I'd rather say we're guardians of for our lifetime and really caring for it, nurturing it and knowing that you can leave it in a better place than it was when we first came here. I think we've looked at maps going back about 400 years and there was nothing on the site at all until the early 18th century when it looked as if it was a brickyard. I could make a joke about mountains and mohills but it's been a much bigger, longer and much more fulfilling project than we ever imagined when we first drove to this site. We got an extraordinary brief from Sophie and David, it was quite unlike any that we've had before or since. It was incredibly specific at the same time as very open. I guess the thing that's really memorable to me now is that it was going to be a house for a gardener to create a garden and the garden they wanted to create was going to be a walled garden, an enclosed space that was allowing them to produce the herbs, fruit, vegetables and flowers that they wanted to to use within the house. And so the walled garden was split into two, one which was west-facing, one that was east-facing, in order to take advantage of warming up in the morning sun and the evening sun in the different gardens but also protecting various different species and plants from winds that would come from the east and west. It was very much inspired by Pip Morrison, the landscape architect, that we place the wall of the garden to extend the line of trees on the edge of the valley and to place the house in that line so that there are two parts of the house that stick out from that and those protrude out into the landscape almost like the prow of a ship. So the house in a way lines up with various different bigger picture elements and I think that locks it into the landscape. I think the other way we feel that it connects to the landscape in particular is it's made from the earth of the landscape and it literally grows out a little bit like a geological structure. The whole site was turned into a quarry, kind of harking back to its original use as a brick factory. Clay has been used for construction for generations, centuries. We realised that we could combine clay extracted from the site and brick waste from demolition, crush all of that up and build walls out of it. Architecture is often drawn in planned section and elevation. This one really needed site sampling and site mock-ups and really quick sketching. Every site visit we'd allocate an hour or two with the site manager, carpenters and the labourers to work out two or three details. Those are quite fond memories because it was a kind of example of collective thinking and collaborative working which you don't often get in construction sites and it brought a sense of collective ownership of what people were making as well. We asked the experts, we asked the crafts people, they're doing this thing every day so hearing from them how they made it was really really important to us. Ultimately when the design conversations went directly to the people making it we found that that added a lot of value to the project. Finding that common language was less about aesthetic and it didn't define necessarily things were put together just that they needed to be put together thoughtfully. In a way it's magical, the building has a life of its own so I love when I'm walking through this house seeing the elements that have been brought to us by the various individuals and their skills and their imagination. I was saying to David this week that I finally found the word that I can use to explain what it feels like to me to live in this house which is wonderment. Every day I am in this sense of wonderment. It's now become the centre for our lives and it's our home. It's been a joyful discovery of ourselves and what we can do and bring to it and contribute and how we can live.