Brick, laid the slow way
A garden wall built by one bricklayer over a summer, in Flemish bond, with lime...
Cement mortar is fast, hard and grey. Lime mortar is slow, soft and the colour of sand. A wall laid in lime moves with the seasons and can be taken apart and relaid a century later. A wall laid in cement cracks, and the bricks crack with it.
The bond
Flemish: a header and a stretcher alternating along each course, so the wall reads as a pattern rather than a surface. It is slower to lay and it uses more bricks. It is the one you look at.
The bricks
Handmade, from a yard forty miles away, with the slight sag that comes from being thrown into a mould rather than pressed. No two the same, which is why the wall never looks flat.
The summer
One bricklayer, four months, a wall sixty metres long. It is the best thing on the site and it does not have a roof.
One building a month, by email
A photograph, the plan, and the reason. Nothing else.
Hana Sato
Architect and one of the four partners. Writes most of what appears here and draws the plans with no furniture on them.
Folio
An architecture and interiors journal: houses, rooms, materials, and the reasons behind them.
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