See the cozy confines of a dirt-built home
Eamonn Wong, 5, stands inside the rammed earth home designed by his mother, Terrell Wong. The house, with walls made of compacted dirt, requires no exterior or interior cladding.
Sylvia Cook, left, and Terrell Wong.
The kitchen. The rammed earth home was designed by Terrell Wong, a specialist in sustainable architecture, for retired teachers Sylvia Cook and Stephen Cavalier, who wanted it as a showcase for their company Aerecura.
A section of formwork used in the rammed earth construction.
The living room feature wall shows off the warm texture of the compacted earth structure.
The master bathroom. 'There's a randomness to the soil that creates a randomness in the walls,' says Sylvia Cook.
The master bedroom. “Sleeping in rammed earth - this is crazy - is one of my favourite things to do in this house,” says Ms. Cook. “It feels so quiet, and I think it's mainly that the temperature is the same, the humidity stays the same, the air quality is so good.”
The open riser staircase was “an amazing piece of serendipity,” said Ms. Cook. After the concept was described to a local welder, he said he had something just like it in his barn, which had been salvaged out of the old Belleville railway roundhouse.
Interior detail. Sand and gravel for the rammed earth walls was 'leftover' stuff from a quarry located just five minutes away.
Southeast elevation.
The stair from mezzanine.
Windows were imported from Internorm in Germany. They are Passive House certified, rated at R-7 or above, and triple-glazed.
The monolithic rammed earth walls before the frame was built. Because formwork is so expensive to build, the architect was given just three shapes to use: two corner forms and a straight wall. Ms. Wong and Aerecura refer to those construction drawings as the “Lego drawings.”
Southeast elevation. The whole ramming process took a little over five months. With the experience gained, Ms. Cook says the same work would now take two to three months: “It has to be done properly but it's not rocket science; you have to have a sense of when it's perfectly tamped, but once you've got that, you've got it.”
Wall detail, exterior. Logs cleared from the driveway were used to build the support structure for the deck.
Southwest elevation.