Every band is one lift — a layer of graded earth placed and compacted before the next goes on. The rhythm is set on the mock-up and repeated up the whole wall.
In-situ rammed earth is rare in this region. We are one of a small number of contractors who build it here, with our own crews rather than a subcontracted team.
The UAE Pavilion in Doha — a complete pavilion in in-situ rammed earth — took the Gold Award for Best Self-Built Pavilion.
What it is
Rammed earth is exactly what the name says: graded soil, moistened to a precise water content and compacted in horizontal lifts inside formwork until it reaches strength. The banding you see in a finished wall is the record of how it was built.
Very few contractors in this region can deliver complete rammed earth projects. We are one of them, and we built the UAE Pavilion at Expo 2023 Doha in it — which took the Gold Award for Best Self-Built Pavilion.
What we offer
Mix design is the project
Every rammed earth wall begins with the soil. We test it, run multiple trial mixes, and Ahmad signs the final mix design personally before anything is built.
We design to code — NZS 4297, 4298 and 4299, Australian HB 195, and Houben & Guillaud. We aim to win at least 30% of the mixture from the site itself, and to draw quarried material from within 50 km, because transport is where an earth wall's carbon footprint actually sits.
Our house rules, learned the hard way
Coarse sand, not fine. Fine sand leaves the surface vulnerable to erosion.
Total sand capped at 40% of the mix.
Aim for self-coloured earth first; pigment only where the design demands it.
Grind and sieve pigment before mixing. Skip that step and the finished wall carries droplet-shaped colour stains.
Surface character has two levers: aggregate size and ramming energy. A coarser surface comes from aggregate up to 20 mm with moderate ramming. A fine surface comes from aggregate capped at 10 mm with heavy ramming.
Testing and acceptance
A 2 × 2 m reference mock-up with eleven bands is built and approved before the permanent works begin. The approved mock-up governs colour, texture and band set-out — acceptance becomes objective rather than a discussion about taste.
For stabilised work: 28-day unconfined compressive strength of at least 8 MPa, tested on the mock-up and then at an agreed production frequency. This is a hold point, and the consultant signs it before permanent works proceed.
For unstabilised work, acceptance runs to NZS 4298: compressive strength of at least 1.3 MPa, flexural tensile of at least 0.25 MPa, linear shrinkage under 3%, and the whole-brick drop test during construction.
Unlimited samples
Before we build your wall, we will build you as many trial panels as it takes to arrive at the surface you want. That is a commercial commitment, not a courtesy — with rammed earth, the sample is the specification.
How a rammed earth wall gets built
Four stages, in order, and none of them can be skipped. The wall is made once, on site, and it cannot be corrected afterwards with a coating — which is why the sampling and the mock-up carry as much weight as the ramming itself.
Sampling
Mixes are trialled as blocks before anything is built. Aggregate, sand and the clay fraction are varied batch by batch, each block rammed in the same lifts as the wall so the strata read true. Colour is judged on the cured block in daylight, never on a screen.
Site mock-up
A 2 x 2 m reference mock-up with eleven bands is built on site and signed off before permanent works begin. It fixes the colour sequence, the lift heights and the surface, and it becomes the standard the finished wall is measured against.
Shuttering
Formwork is engineered, not improvised. H20 beam shutters are set plumb and braced with raking props to take the outward force of compaction, and the panel layout decides where every joint and lift line will fall.
Ramming
Earth goes in a shallow layer at a time and is compacted until the rammer note changes. That moment is the whole craft: too little and the lift is soft, too much and the band closes up. Then the next lift, and the next, up the height of the panel.
Acceptance testing to 8 MPa runs alongside the build, referencing New Zealand's earth building standards. The projects page shows the finished walls; send us your drawings and we will tell you what the wall needs.
Go deeper
Warranty
Ten years.
Featured projects
Built with this material, by our own artisans. Open the project for the full set of photographs and the story of the installation.
