As a child, Neha Ballal would spend hours toying with clay. She loved the creative abandon the material allowed. Now at 32, that love has segued into a professional pursuit. Architect Neha, having fashioned a home out of mud and cob (a binder made out of clay, sand, and straw), is now looking at delving deeper into the gamut of sustainable architecture, perhaps even coaching those who want to build a home like hers.
Perched on the shoulders of the mountains in Wan village in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district, the mud home melts into the landscape, as if it were always a part of it. Neha insists that the project, although complete — the building process started in November 2021 and went on for a year — is ever-evolving. “The beauty about a mud home is that it grows with you,” she says.
A cursory glance of the home reveals that it’s a mosaic of creative instincts. “Across the years, when I’ve had friends over, I would hand them some clay and ask them to sculpt whatever they felt like. I wanted them to have the freedom to break and to form,” she shares, adding that their handiwork features as decor around the home in the form of curios and animal figures.
Traversing the mountains
There’s a certain magic to mud that draws Neha to it. “That and my experiences in remote areas,” she says. She credits a trip to Nepal soon after graduating in 2015 for piquing her interest in rural architecture.
Neha built her own mud home in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district
This was in the aftermath of the earthquake that year, which registered a moment magnitude of 7.8. “We were volunteering to rebuild homes,” Neha explains, adding that the attitudes of the local people and her experiences during the rebuilding made her realise how she could channel her architectural knowledge to make a difference. “In the cities, everyone has a ready Pinterest board of ideas, but in remote villages, architecture holds value. Ideas hold value.”
When Neha floated the idea of moving to the mountains and building a mud home, her decision was met with scepticism: “Everyone’s doing the opposite. Why would you retreat to the place everyone’s leaving behind?” So today, when her home gets visitors from the city — the home is listed on Airbnb and makes for a peaceful escape from city hustle, and locals — those looking to transition to cement homes are realising the potential of sticking to sustainable architectural practices, which are more enduring in the long run, it is validation for Neha.
“This was my intent. I wanted people to see the potential mud has. It has so many unexplored properties: it is flexible, it is versatile to work with, and every seepage solution can be solved by using the material itself,” she points out. “And it also maintains the ambient temperature,’ she adds.
The mud home was built using a technique called earthbag construction
Referencing her century-old ancestral home in Udupi, Karnataka, Neha says that too performs well in extreme temperatures, simply because of its laterite and lime plaster architecture. “The minute you step in, you feel a marked difference in the temperature. The structure is just more breathable. Mud makes the home feel alive.”
Aside from being good from an architectural standpoint, mud lends a quiet colour and character to the structure.
Resuscitating traditional architectural practices
While in the cottage, the thrum of the outside world melts away.
You feel you are being cocooned within the womb of ecology.
Elaborating on the building process, Neha says the materials were sourced locally. “We used a technique called earthbag construction, wherein we filled empty cement sacks with soil to create walls.”
Payal Singh, who helped Neha during the building process, says the most intrepid (and fun) part was sourcing the soil. “The area used to have a lot of landslides, and so, after each, we would go to the site and collect the mud from pickup trucks. Then we would fill it in empty sacks to make ‘bricks’.”
Cement bags filled with mud act like ‘bricks’, which when stacked together create a wall
This technique significantly helped the ease of construction, she says. “If you compare mud walls to brick walls, the former are thicker. They are at least a foot wide. Filling soil into a cement bag, which is then sealed, helps provide this thickness. When stacked, these cement bags form a thick wall. Working with these bags makes it easier than the traditional way of building a thick mud wall, which requires much more labour.”
Local wisdom featured heavily in the project.
Neha and Payal, joined by the people of the village and even children who were excited to lend a hand in the construction, would proceed to plaster the earth bags with cob. “The mud and clay for the cob mix were sourced from within a 20-kilometre radius, and the sand was collected from the stream behind the house. The neighbourhood children loved the cob-making sessions, where we would mix the sand, clay, and soil before we plastered it on the bags.”
The availability of local help and materials also reduced the cost of the project. Neha says the entire home was completed within Rs 1,30,000. She sees the place as a safe little abode high up in the mountains with nothing more than birdsong and nature to keep you company. The cottage features a comfortable king-sized bed, an attached toilet with hot water, and a kitchenette equipped with an induction stove and kettle.
Local wisdom featured heavily in the mud home with the village people contributing to the design and cob making sessions
The land encourages you to live at a slower tempo. The landowner, Balwant, also a taxi driver and guide, takes guests on tours while his wife, Meena, prepares meals. Neha loves ensuring that the locals have as much to benefit from the home as she does. It is, after all, their brainchild too. Sharing about the journey, which was interjected with learnings, Neha says, “There were so many instances that made me realise that local wisdom trumps mainstream architectural knowledge.”
Sharing an anecdote, she says, “Because of the owner’s house being attached to my property, I had to build a free-standing wall that wasn’t supported by anything, no column to frame it. Now, this is a big ‘no’ for an architect; we don’t even design compound walls without columns.”
Neha managed to construct the home within Rs 1,30,000
Pointing out that earthbag construction is typically done in a circular format, she says, because that wall was already there, they had to work around it. “I could see that as we stacked the sacks higher, the wall began to shake. According to mainstream architectural logic, if you put weight on any side of a free-standing wall, it will fall. But Balwant and the local masons believed it would hold. Their idea was to connect the wall to another wall, one that was still attached to the remaining part of the house, using a wooden beam on the roof, and then secure it with mud plaster. With that simple hack, the wall held firm.”
Whether it was this or the many other challenges they faced while building the home, Neha says, “The locals always had one antidote to everything: ‘Tomorrow is a new day. We’ll find a solution.’”
You can book your stay at the home here.
All pictures courtesy Neha
