Underwater cameraman James Loudon’s reverence for the natural world served as inspiration when building his earthly habitat.
Elemental inspiration
As an underwater cameraman, James Loudon spends a lot of his time underwater filming big animal encounters in far flung places to help the rest of us understand and become familiar with this big but somewhat unfathomable part of our planet. He is also keenly aware of the threats that our modern lifestyles and conventional construction methods pose to humanity, the planet, and this underwater world.
So it was essential that James’s home helps him to reconnect with his earthly habitat but also to reflect his reverence for the natural world. One day he was driving past Scarborough on his way to go surfing when he fell in love with the views of the ocean and the feeling of a remote kind of green coastal lifestyle that felt possible there.
Organic and functional design
James brought a plot in Scarborough in 2014 shortly after discovering its quiet beauty. At the time, he was drawn to strawbale building but on further education he realised that strawbale might result in moisture problems in Cape Town’s wet winters. He still felt that natural building techniques were a way to reconnect with the earth and our history as humans on earth; and that natural building satisfied his need for more environmentally friendly, sustainable, and earthly habitats.
I was always drawn to natural building techniques, just intuitively as a way to reconnect with the earth and reconnect with our history as humans on earth. And also it just intuitively felt right and satisfied my need for more environmentally friendly, sustainable and earthly habitats.
His father was the architect of the house and specialised in doing buildings out of concrete and glass. They were able to work together to design a building using natural materials and kept the design very simple for cost and ease of construction. James purposefully didn’t use any curved walls and kept the design within what was simple to build and functional to live in.
Unfortunately his father passed away before the building was completed, but he was impressed that James was able to take on this project and that he got to share this experience with his son and see some of the walls up.
Earthed inside
The building is constructed from adobe bricks and stone foundations. There was a lack of suitable clay close by and so he had to import the clay for the earth mix from a friend that was building a dam on a farm in Tesselaarsdal. James acknowledges that the transport of the clay is not the best solution from an environmental perspective. But the clay was of a very high quality with a strong clay content and a beautiful colour, which enabled him to make very strong bricks and provided a function on the farm with the building of the dam.
Unfortunately, his plot wasn’t ideally situated for passive solar design and he doesn’t get a lot of sun inside the house. But the house stays really cool in summer, and in winter a small fireplace heats up the small space really well while the earth walls retain the heat.
Water conservation is a cornerstone of James’s life, and so the house includes a composting [dry] toilet. This no-waste approach is incorporated into his garden. One of the benefits of keeping the design simple is a large flat roof which is great for rainwater harvesting, which he’s been using in the garden and is linked to the house during winter as well. He also installed solar power in 2023 and so is mostly off the grid.
Local is lekker
James attended our natural building course in 2016, and combined this new knowledge and experience with the expertise of some locals from the Red Hill area near Scarborough who had experience building with conventional materials but had never built any natural buildings. In this way, James felt he was creating jobs and providing opportunities by putting money into people’s lives and not externalising costs into the industrial building complex.
He employed between five and seven labourers mostly on a full-time basis for about seven months of the build. This included digging foundations to breaking up big boulders – which he got from another nearby construction site in Simon’s Town – and making bricks onsite.
The site is approximately 600 sqm and the house is 120 sqm – which includes 100 sqm clay and 20 sqm wooden structure upstairs – and they managed to leave some natural bush with room available for brick making. They started making bricks when the rain cleared up in the beginning of October 2018, and by mid-December (builder’s holiday) all the bricks were made and stored undercover on site to continue the curing process. By February they were building foundations with rock and a hydrophobic lime-rich mortar. The total construction period was eight to nine months, and the building was fully complete when James moved in in the middle of June.
Earthly habitat
As someone that uses visual media as a tool for environmental advocacy James wanted to build a home that was beautiful and that reflected his reverence for the natural world; he really wanted to live in a building which felt like it represented his connection to the natural world.
He achieved that with a simple design and clever use of natural building materials, and he relishes the end-result:
It’s very quiet inside, even just the sound of the wind. You really feel protected from the elements and very kind of earthed inside the kind of cave-like interior of the house.
He’s really proud of the home that he’s built and says that everyone that comes into the space is really just blown away by the colours and textures and the feel that he’s achieved with just earth.
This course was an awakening to me, an exporsure to a radical new [old] way to live connected to the earth.