Author: tinymud_lwligh

Most mud building is beautifully simple. That’s exactly why it’s found all over the world: you dig the earth beneath your feet, add water and straw, and build. Even today, somewhere between 650 and 700 million people live in earthen homes.

People have been building this way for a very long time. Some of the earliest known homes, in Jericho in Palestine, were made of mud bricks around 11,000 years ago. And earth can rise higher than you might imagine: in Shibam, Yemen, often called the “Manhattan of the desert”, hundreds of mud-brick tower houses stand up to 11 storeys tall, built in the 16th century and still lived in today.

But simple isn’t the same as easy. The techniques take minutes to explain and years to master, because this isn’t knowledge that lives in your head. You learn it through your hands and feet. Every soil is different, and every batch you mix has its own texture. Each one needs just the right balance to hold together and dry without cracking, and the only way to find that balance is to feel it, again and again.

In a previous life I ran a small cake bakery here, and mud building often reminds me of baking. You try a new ingredient, swap one thing for another, test it and adjust a little each time until you understand what it does. The ingredients in mud seem far simpler, and you wait a good deal longer to see the results. That, for me, is part of the beauty of this craft.

Over the last decade I’ve learned this way, by getting my hands in, making mistakes and slowly understanding why a natural house wants to be built the way it is: why the walls go where they do, how it breathes, how it sheds water and stays cool. Once you start to see a building like that, it stops being a list of techniques and becomes a conversation with the land, the weather and the people who will live in it.

So in January we won’t just be building. We’ll be feeling our way through each mix together and talking through why each choice gets made. My hope is that you leave not only knowing how, but with a feel for the whole path, should you ever choose to walk it yourself.

Where this goes after the workshop, I honestly don’t know yet. I stopped making long term plans years ago. Maybe it will be more workshops. Maybe conversations that carry on once the mud has dried. I’m holding it loosely and following what wants to happen.

If any of this stirs something in you, the workshop page has everything you need.

2015 was the first time I stood with my feet in a mud pit. It was an experience that planted so many seeds for the life I am still living today.

I thought I was going to learn a new skill. What I came away with was a group of amazing friends, the inspiration to try something and also the confidence to build a building. It was the single most empowering experience of my life.

It was physical work and so much more. We mixed with our feet, passed bricks along a line and raised walls together. I had a permanent red earth mud-i-cure from the iron-rich clay of Chiang Dao. The work was slow and it was shared. Somewhere in those days I understood that the building was only one part of what was happening. The unexpected part (for me back then) was relational. It was the people. It was the way we took care of each other as much as the building.

Something else rearranged my future. I never thought I could build a whole house. Once upon a time I worked in finance, arranging and underwriting mortgages for self builds so I knew people did build houses – but for so much money. Or by spending decades paying off the debt. I am a maker of things – I’m good with my hands and I love to learn crafts. Even so, I never thought I could ever build my own home. It was something we could make ourselves, on our own terms. It really blew my brain apart to think this was possible.

Once you feel that, you cannot ‘unfeel’ it. When we work together, in community, we make things that matter. Things that hold us. Things that go on supporting us for a lifetime. I found my way into that world and I have been here ever since. Sometimes I wonder if this is simply how we used to live, and how life was meant to be.

My home now sits in a small forest about 30 minutes south of Chiang Mai. Once it was bare sand, old mango trees and not one green leaf. Now it’s crowded with trees and village chickens. I designed and built so much along the way, mostly by hand. Trial and error has taught me a lot, and much of what is still here I learned from nature herself.

This is what I want to share.

From 16 to 22 January 2027, I’m opening my home for the Womens Tiny Mud House Workshop: a week of building a small earthen house together, from the ground up.

I’ll share more about what it holds in the next story. For now, I just wanted to tell you where it comes from.