This calm retail interior features a biocomposite brick made by compacting local soil with spent tea leaves using a traditional rammed-earth technique. Pressed rather than fired, the “tea-earth” material turns waste into a tactile architecture – all with lower embodied carbon and a circular end-of-life.
In Beijing, a new concept store by théATRE showcases a material experiment with large implications for low-carbon interiors: a biocomposite brick made from tea leaves and soil, formed using a traditional rammed-earth method. The space – designed by Tokyo-based kooo architects – reads as calm and elemental, but its most interesting work happens in the walls themselves.
Tea production, much like coffee, generates significant organic by-product: fragmented leaves, stems and fine dust left after processing. Instead of sending this fibre to compost or landfill, the project binds it into the building fabric.
The process involves compressing the materials using a low carbon, traditional rammed earth approach. Rammed earth relies on compression rather than firing, avoiding the embodied energy of kiln-made bricks.
Once cured, each brick carries a subtle speckle of leaf particles–visual proof of the material’s origin and a reminder that waste streams can be design inputs.
About 80 per cent of the store envelope is finished in the tea-earth material, creating a unique yet breathable lining. The surface registers as matte and mineral from a distance, while up close, it reveals the freckled inclusions of oxidised tea.
Because the bricks are unfired and lightly stabilised, they remain recyclable at end-of-life: units can be crushed and re-rammed, or returned to soil without toxic residues. The tea earth bricks have also been used on doors, and furniture.
Where the hand lingers – at the long tasting bar and bench tops – solid timber with raw, bark-edge profiles complements the earthen mass.
The spatial sequence stays deliberately simple so the material can lead. A sales hall opens to a tasting counter, a quiet lounge and a concealed tea room. South-facing glazing and timber grilles wash the bricks with soft daylight. A lowered counter height encourages unhurried exchanges between host and guest – aligning the social ritual of tea with the slow craft of earth construction.
This prototype goes beyond aesthetics with a bio-aggregate that stores biogenic carbon, uses abundant local soil, and can cycle back into new components. It’s a pragmatic demonstration that circular material flows can be beautiful, buildable and commercially legible.
By turning a ubiquitous waste stream into a contemporary surface, thé ATRE’s concept store highlights the opportunity for regional by-products.
