Designed by Tecture, Deans Marsh House is a rammed earth and timber home in rural Victoria, arranged as two pavilions either side of an earthen spine.
At their best rural houses are built to age well – to weather and soften into place. Deans Marsh House, in the rolling countryside inland from Victoria’s south-west coast, is one of these. Built for a couple settling into the country, it responds to their needs now, but also in the future. Two materials underpin the design aesthetic, rammed earth and timber, each chosen to improve with age. While not completely off grid, the services, already drawing on solar and rainwater, are staged so the house can move towards it in time.
The house sits ensconced in its surrounds, a large site with a rugged coastal landscape and dense copse. The plan is shaped around the way the couple lives. With their children grown up and often coming to stay, the house expands and contracts with the seasons: two parallel pavilions run east to west, divided by a central passage that serves as the building’s spine. The front pavilion faces north and gathers the shared life of the house – living and dining rooms, a snug, the main bedroom, the everyday run of laundry and mudroom – while the back pavilion holds the guest bedrooms and a bathroom and closes down entirely when no one is staying. Eaves reach over the northern windows to draw in the low winter sun and hold off the high summer one, making the most of its passive orientation.
Rammed earth is one of the key materials. “It was the first time we’d worked with it, so we had to resolve how to detail it and how to build it,” says Ben Robertson, director of the practice and lead architect on the project. Tecture collaborated with Earth Structures Group, a local contractor with extensive experience. “As soon as I started designing with it, I had this amazing sounding board,” Robertson says. “We were running square-metre calculations against every design decision.”
Rammed earth walls up to 450 millimetres thick divide each pavilion into zones and frames the outlook. The rest of the palette is quiet, natural and earthen – the same timber flooring throughout, timber joinery and natural stone, all in soothing neutrals.
“We avoided the Beech oak tones and opted for richer timber colours,” Robertson says. The rammed earth walls shape the house, but also bring inherent benefits. Rammed earth carries considerable thermal mass. “The clients have been amazed,” Robertson says on the thermal control from the material, noting that “It’s the insulation and the rammed earth working together.”
The house is designed to keep evolving, and the materials are intended to shift as well: the timber cladding and decking outside are left to silver, so it reads less new with each season and more at home in the country around it.
Deans Marsh House is a home built to be lived in now and grown into later, its earth walls holding the warmth as the timber silvers around them.
Photography by Timothy Kaye
