Tuckey Design Studio has built a reputation on adaptive reuse, finding new life for existing structures across London and Switzerland. The firm faced a unique challenge when a client requested a ground-up house on a Wiltshire countryside site. The location held a disused Victorian brickworks, but the existing structures were unusable.
“We were conflicted because we only work with existing buildings,” explains Jonathan Tuckey, founder of the studio. The original building lacked views, light, and proper orientation toward the valley. The team needed a way to reuse the site without keeping the actual structure.
They found the answer in unstabilized rammed earth. The material consists primarily of water, clay, and gravel. The site offered an abundance of clay directly beneath the soil, while the demolished brickworks provided crushed brick and concrete aggregate. Most ingredients for this circular “construction cake mix” were already on-site.
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Building with the Land
The resulting Rammed Earth House is a textured domestic complex finished with traditional materials like cedar shingles, copper drainpipes, and reclaimed greenheart timber colonnades. The construction process was undeniably labor intensive. The team demolished existing buildings, excavated clay, and sorted waste, effectively turning the site into a quarry.
Builders had to determine the optimal composition, settling on a precise 25/25/25/25 ratio of clay, demolition aggregate, locally sourced limestone gravel, and water. Local contractors spent months testing small sections of the walls. If a section wasn’t strong enough, they knocked it down and started over. The definitive walls were painstakingly constructed layer by layer, with the rammed earth manually compressed by the builders.
Scaling Up Sustainable Methods
After completing the project in mid-2024, the studio and contractor Stonewood Builders decided to scale the concept. They are establishing a rammed earth factory to produce prefabricated panels. “By using standardized panels that can be dropped into position on site, construction can happen quickly and not be so weather dependent,” Tuckey explains.
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There is a financial incentive too. “Since you get paid for taking construction waste away, we wouldn’t just be getting free materials but actually making money by using them.” Their first venture using this method will be a set of six terraced houses in Wiltshire or Gloucestershire. The goal is to bring costs close to affordable housing levels.
The studio has other new builds in the works, including a homestead with four residences and communal facilities such as a spa, sauna, and family dining room. They are also constructing a new home in Surrey, England, made of timber, hempcrete, and a lime concrete. A recent residential interiors project in Yorkshire involved reconfiguring layouts and creating bespoke joinery.