



Paul Geraets was taking a moment to survey the newly rammed earth walls at his emerging cliff top property when Eunice and Peter Martin wandered up to the building site.
They both remember the moment well. It was early 1993 in Whale Bay, Raglan, where Geraets had been directing a motley crew of local surfers and mates in the ancient practice of ramming earth into forms then removing them to let the walls dry.
The Martins had turned up because they were a pair of green-building early-adopters whose children had flown the nest. Accordingly, they’d bought a patch of land in a disused quarry not far away in Cambridge. They wanted to branch out and do something different.
“We had decided on a change, an adventure. We saw an article in the Listener on Earthships and started looking into it. But we studied the local council guidelines and found the Waikato District Council were really strict, and this was going to be too far out of the square.
“We then joined Earth Building Association New Zealand (EBANZ) and went to some meetings. One day we stood next to someone who was talking about a rammed earth builder in Raglan and my ears were flapping. We found him building his own place at Whale Bay, turned up and knocked on the wall -there was no door on site at that stage you see…I think he was quite taken aback when we asked if he would consider building our house!”….