Archive for the ‘Clay’ Category
We’re at Stand S1660, and we will be doing demos daily at 11am and 1pm.
Do come and say hello to the Clayworks team – Adam, Katy and Chris.
Later this month, we’ll also be represented at The National Homebuilding and Renovating Show, March 29-April 1, at the NEC, Birmingham (0844 581 1375). £10 in advance or £15 on the door.
This week’s Sunday Telegraph tells the story of Clayworks and our position at the centre of what we call “new old” building materials.
“The interesting thing is that owners of old houses come to us, but people who live in completely modern houses come as well,” says Adam. “They want a softer, rounded finish with a slight polish, something which is nice to run your hands over. It is a method which has been used for 5,000 years. It is toxin-free, healthy and breathable.”
When the Observer and Times photographer Ray Main comes knocking, you don’t turn down the opportunity.
Ray has the ability to frame the essence of Clayworks – he also manages to capture some rare moments when Directors Adam and Katy are actually the focus of attention (instead of the wall they are clay plastering).
Here Ray lets us have a peek at what his eye finds when roaming Claywork’s inner sanctum and private clay plaster projects.
Clay works uncut
The company will be at EcoBuild 2011, ExCel, London - come and visit us at stand 1260 next to the Natural Materials Zone. We will be doing clay plastering demos twice daily at noon and 2.30. We hope to see you there.
A kitchen that we recently plastered with our Clayworks top coat clay plaster formula. Photograph by Ray Main.
Our enclosure in the latest Green Product Directory (walls, ceilings and partitions section) leads our current marketing drive to the architect community. We shall be giving our first CPD on clay plasters in the UK in October. Please contact us if this would be of interest to you or your firm of architects, designers or specifiers. Contact Adam Weismann or James Bryce on 01326 341 339.
We manufacture clay blocks and clay plasters here in Cornwall, UK. We restore ancient cob buildings and construct new natural buildings. We use unfired clay to construct walls, create internal finishes and to lay floors. We also work with lime to plaster and render both new and old buildings. We only use materials in our buildings that are healthy for the building, the builder, the inhabitant and the planet.
Our passion is to bring traditional building techniques into the contemporary building landscape. Buildings made from clay perform better to create healthy internal environments and can be constructed to leave a minimal footprint on the environment.
Picture to the left is a yoga studio we built and designed. Clay floor, clay walls, clay plaster.
Last month we constructed two earth ovens and six cob benches in an orchard at the National Trust site in Gorran Haven. 120 kids from Gorran school were able to partake in the mixing of cob and construction of the benches and ovens over five days. It was a fun experience.
Now that the colder weather makes it less suitable for cob building and exterior limework, we are taking a rest visiting Adams family in America. We have been able to talk to and meet with producers of compressed earth blocks in New Mexico, where there is a long history of building with unfired clay bricks (adobe). It was good to revisit many of the places that we visited three years ago when we were there researching for our second book, Using Natural Finishes: Lime and clay based plasters, renders, paints and washes.
Seeing that there was a demand for skilled practitioners in cob building and lime plastering, and having developed a huge passion for this work, we officially launched our company – Cob in Cornwall. We set ourselves a specific manifesto that wherever possible we would build with materials that were sourced locally or from on site, we would build with natural, unprocessed materials and use hand tools to build with. This has been possible on the majority of our projects that we have worked on over the years as many of these projects have involved rebuilding old cob walls that have collapsed or are in serious disrepair. The standard protocol has been to bring down the old walls and simply remix the cob with fresh straw and extra aggregate if needed. We had lots of work on the Lizard Peninsula where we live. This is because the sub-soil is so perfect for making cob.
We began exploring low impact and natural building. This lead us to the Cob Cottage Company in Oregon. In 2001 we apprenticed with them to learn how to make beautiful, sustainable, natural homes out of earth (cob). Cob is a mixture of clay sub-soil, straw and aggregate, which is mixed together with water. It is built onto a stone plinth in ‘lifts’ of approximately 300-400mm in one building session, after which it is allowed to dry before building the next lift. Our walls are on average 600mm wide. After our apprenticeship, we returned to the UK (Cornwall) inspired about natural building and building with earth. Our first jobs were predominantly restoring ancient cob buildings, of which there are many in Cornwall.