Materials and form are intrinsic to one another. We love working with limestone and travertine to create floors that will develop a beautiful patina with time, using textured bricks and rammed earth to shape solid walls, and lining ceilings with timber to create contrast and textural warmth. We carve out spaces, exploring how shadows and light spill over deep reveals or how the patina of limestone evolves with time. Strong materials like stone or brick or rammed earth are juxtaposed with softer fabrics. There’s a sensuality in all those layers and an honesty in their porous surfaces. You have to get the balance right though – don’t enforce the form too loudly or dilute its potential.
Rammed earth walls are crafted using techniques that date back to the Great Wall of China. It is a profoundly simple building material, and the thick surface is rich with the story of human endeavour. The faint impressions left by the timber formwork, the marks of bolts that held the panels together, and the subtle wear on boards that have been used countless times on other structures. Each detail reveals the craft, labour and time embedded in the making. It is up to us to shape them with the imprint of our lives.
Materials can be used to shift the pace and flow of an interior, slowing it down
to create a focal point to a view outside, a textural connection with a room beyond, or a sense of calm. A brick archway expresses its construction and punctuates the internal flow. There’s something very beautiful about the feel of solidity as you move through a space. The weight of a door as it opens, the feel of solid blocks of stone under foot, the quiet movement as the door pivots, and the deep click as it closes.
Patterns are a material language that adds hierarchy and subtly signals which details deserve attention. Revisiting a traditional material and reinventing it with a new pattern or texture connects the past with the present by making it both familiar and surprising.
When one of our clients fell in love with a terracotta floor tile she saw at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul de Vence outside Paris, we searched for a maker who could recreate its sculpted pattern. In Spain, we found the Spanish company that has made this tile since the 1950s and still has the original mould in their factory. The shape, colour and texture of the tile, designed by the Spanish architect Josep Lluís Sert, gives Terra Firma House a beautiful rhythm underfoot. It moves like a soft wave from the interior to the patio. To balance that movement, we added layers of quietly crafted materials – textured brick, fine battened timber doors, a solid block of marble in the kitchen, furniture and custom rugs – that define the spaces and ground them.
Organic, porous, natural materials change with the weather – they evolve and age. That’s why we love them. You can read their history and they get better with time.