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The Adanado Rammed Earth Home
When most people walk onto a piece of property, what possibilities do they imagine for their future dream home? They might reflect on the views, the proximity to the nearest town, the quality of the school district, and other common considerations. For Johnna Barrett of the architectural and real estate development firm Barrett Design, however, looking at the soil underneath her feet was one of the most essential criteria for designing her future home.
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Over the past several years, Barrett and her husband Sid have designed and built a beautiful rammed earth home in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. Located at an altitude of 7,600 feet in one of the highest alpine valleys in the world, Barrett's rammed earth home is entirely off-grid. It's 100 percent powered by solar panels. And, even though winter temperatures can plunge to 50 degrees below zero, an evacuated tube solar hot water collector system heats their hot water.
The thick thermal mass of the walls of the home, created entirely from the soil that they excavated on-site, protects the couple from the cold winter winds and the hot summer. In a recent interview with Rise, Barrett shared essential insights and advice related to how she and her husband designed and built a home constructed from locally-sourced materials.
Tell us about the design of your Adanado rammed earth home.
Our Adanado home's interior is 1,160 square feet. It is a simple layout—living room on one side, master bedroom on the other, and the kitchen bridges the two primary spaces. Between the bedroom and living room, there is a large covered terrace. It has a spectacular view of Mt. Blanca, the Great Sand Dunes National Monument, and several other 14ers (14,000-foot-high peaks). There is also a small study adjacent to the living room that can be used as a second bedroom.
What are some of the primary sustainability features?
The house was built literally from the earth on site. That means very few materials were trucked into the site, and for those, we used as many locally sourced materials as we could find. The forms for the walls were plywood that, when removed from the walls, we used as our roof sheathing. We are completely off-grid. A well was dug before the beginning of construction, and a solar panel was installed to operate it. All of our power is solar energy; we are not grid-tied. We have a battery bank for electricity storage, and our heating comes from the sun. We installed an evacuated tube system for both domestic hot water and floor heating. The sun heats the liquid, which then flows into our storage tank and circulates through the home. We made our own clay wall finishes for the interior surfaces.
Why did you decide on rammed earth construction?
I wanted to build something that genuinely appears to have grown up from the land organically. To be able to use the soil on-site and sculpt it into inhabitable forms; that was truly special. And the finished wall surface is beautiful! Added bonus.
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Tobias Roberts
Tobias runs an agroecology farm and a natural building collective in the mountains of El Salvador. He specializes in earthen construction methods and uses permaculture design methods to integrate structures into the sustainability of the landscape.
