The house’s thermal mass establishes a stable microclimate. “We recently built another 3,000-square-foot home that consumes only a third of the energy of a comparably sized stick-frame building,” she says. Predesigned rammed-earth homes use simple electric baseboards, she says, because they consume less than 25 kilowatts per square metre for heating she adds that there is typically no requirement for air conditioning in rammed-earth homes. The only other heat source is an infrared panel in the dining area for the occasional cold evening,” says Wong. “In Sylvia Cook’s home, we used heat from the hot water tank to put radiant heating in the floor below the living area. “As musicians, my husband and I appreciate the wonderful acoustics, too,” she says.Ĭonstruction costs run about 10 per cent higher than traditional building, but the difference is soon recouped through energy efficiencies. “We use what’s left once the gravel has been removed from a local pit for other purposes.”Ĭook’s home not only met her sustainability goals, but captured her heart with its natural beauty, consistently pleasant warmth, and overall quietness, created by its striated walls. “Most of the home is made with subsoil, available in abundance pretty much everywhere on Earth, as opposed to almost every other building material that has to be processed or shipped a great distance, or removes precious topsoil,” Cook says. “I looked into the most sustainable ways of building a house and kept coming back to rammed earth,” says Cook, who founded Aerecura a decade ago in Castleton, Ontario, to construct the first insulated rammed earth home in the province for herself, and subsequently built more such dwellings for others. She wanted its construction to be as kind to the planet as possible. Sylvia Cook was approaching retirement from her career as a high-school physics teacher when she began looking for a dream home for her husband and herself.

Earth rammed home