Tuckey Design Studio Is Rooted in Reuse

Tuckey and his colleagues turned to unstabilized rammed earth as the answer after realizing that it is essentially made of “water, clay and gravel,” and sometimes other aggregates. With plenty of clay available “literally underneath our feet,” and the former brickworks providing plenty of crushed brick and concrete aggregate once demolished, most of the ingredients for this circular “construction cake mix” were right there for the taking.

The resulting Rammed Earth House is a textured, quietly alluring domestic complex, embellished with traditional materials that grow more beautiful with time, such as cedar shingles for the roofing, copper for the drainpipes, and reclaimed greenheart timber for the colonnades. The process of making it was undeniably labor intensive, says Tuckey. First the existing buildings had to be demolished, the clay had to be excavated, and the waste sorted into piles, “effectively turning the site into a quarry.”

Then there was the task of working out the optimal building material composition—a 25/25/25/25 ratio of clay, demolition aggregate (formed of crushed brick and concrete), locally sourced limestone gravel, and water. Finally, local contractors had to be brought up to speed in the basics of building with the material and spent several months testing small portions of the walls.  “If it wasn’t strong enough they would knock it down and make another one,” says Tuckey. The definitive walls were painstakingly constructed layer by layer, with the rammed earth manually compressed by the builders.

Once the studio had completed this project in mid-2024, they got a taste for the material. As did the contractor they worked with, Stonewood Builders. “[We] are setting up a rammed earth factory that makes prefabricated rammed earth panels,” says Tuckey, noting that the material actually has the potential to save time and construction costs. “By using standardized panels that can be dropped into position on site, construction can happen quickly and not be so weather dependent,” explains Tuckey. “What’s more, since you get paid for taking construction waste away, we wouldn’t just be getting free materials but actually making money by using them.” The team’s first project will be a set of six terraced houses on a suburban site in Wiltshire or Gloucestershire, for which they are in the very early stages. The idea is to “get them down to a cost that is close to affordable housing.”