This striking beach house, located on the windswept western coastline of the small island of Jersey, UK, has bucket-loads of unusual details, including an upside-down layout, fossils appearing in polished limestone, and exposed rammed-earth walls. It’s the first home on the island to be built using this construction method, which is also the technique used by our three 'houses of the year'.
Explore Wishing Well, a Jersey beach house
Wishing Well was designed by Fieldwork Architects, a practice founded in London in 2018 by James Owen and Tim Gibbons. The pair are known for their creative, collaborative and exploratory approach, with projects ranging from a remodelled 1950s home in Manchester with a long brick extension, to a Japanese and Californian-influenced renovation in London.
For Wishing Well, a three-bedroom house completed in autumn 2025, they needed no further inspiration than the dramatic surrounding scenery, part of an area of outstanding beauty along Jersey’s St Ouen’s Bay, where miles of flat sandy beach meet the fierce Atlantic waves.
The client, a Jersey resident, was keen to return to the island after years spent living in London, and snapped up a dilapidated beachfront dormer bungalow before enlisting the help of Fieldwork Architects.
‘Wishing Well sits on Jersey’s most exposed coastline and provided an opportunity to balance contemporary design with the rugged surroundings,’ explains Gibbons. ‘Working closely alongside the client, we were able to create a home that was a celebration of the surrounding environment and local craftsmanship.’
‘Many of our projects explore materials that respond directly to their site context,’ says Owen. ‘In this instance, the coastal setting inspired the exploration of local granite, sand and earth as a building material to anchor the home to its surroundings. The idea emerged through collaboration with Singh Studio, who worked with us during the initial planning stages.’
The resulting 225 sq m house offers a contemporary take on the island’s traditional farmhouses, concrete bunkers and Norman castles. Like many of its predecessors, it draws heavily on the locally quarried pink-hued granite, which is used in the stone walls but also in the rammed earth walls, speaking in what the architects call ‘a language of material honesty'.
‘The handcrafted, textural finish of the earth draws on the island’s raw geology while the material’s inherent thermal mass helps to naturally regulate temperature, keeping the home cool in summer and insulated during Jersey's damp winters,’ say the architects.
Built in collaboration with Rammed Earth Structures and specialist engineer Elliott Wood, the earth walls comprise a mix of rammed-earth wall aggregate and a fine dust made from ground-down local granite. The material was developed by Fieldwork specifically for the house and involved many tests to ensure the right texture and tone were achieved.
In celebration of these careful experiments, and of the sculptural and tactile quality of the unique construction material, a section of the rammed earth core has been left exposed at the centre of the home. As for the site’s strict planning constraints, which required the architects to work with the existing bungalow, they were not perceived as a hindrance, but a source of inspiration and the project’s conceptual starting point.
‘It was important that the footprint of the original building was celebrated and remained legible in the new house,’ explains Gibbons. ‘It was also a planning requirement that elements of the original structure were retained, and the project was submitted as a series of extensions.’
The team traced the new footprint ‘around the ghost of the original structure’ with a two-storey rammed-earth wall. ‘Sections of the original external wall were retained up to the first floor, and temporarily supported on site to withstand the elements, before being incorporated within the stabilised rammed earth (SRE) and granite wall structures,' says Gibbons.
Additionally, the ground-level bedrooms are wrapped in an extra layer of local granite – ‘the thick walls create a sense of protection from the exposed coastline’, says Owen. The cream-coloured limestone is used strategically throughout, in a variety of finishes, from the exterior window reveals to the polished kitchen worktops and stone framework.
‘The home’s spine wall, which orients the building towards the land and sea, is clad in the same stone as the external reveals,’ explains Owen. ‘The staircase explores a range of textures, combining polished and flamed surfaces alongside an exposed section of the rammed earth wall internally. Large marine fossils have been revealed around the stair opening that reinforces the home’s connection to the sea, particularly as the views of the coast are revealed when ascending the stair.’
Running along two sides of the house, a covered terrace offers shade and protection while still maintaining a connection to the landscape. ‘We wanted the house to feel rooted in its surroundings, with the arrangement of the home connecting with the land and sea, by way of framing views to the outside and utilising natural materials throughout,’ explains Owen.
As well as the bedrooms, the ground floor features a utility zone complete with shower and surfboard storage; it is affectionately known as the ‘boardroom’. Offering perfectly framed views of the surrounding landscape, the main staircase leads to a light-filled open-plan kitchen and lounge, and a dining room located in a timber pavilion.
Fieldwork’s material experiments continue in many of its current projects. ‘We’re investigating the use of hempcrete for an artist’s studio and nearing completion on a rural barn project that makes extensive use of different timbers and cork, says Gibbons. ‘Our work responds to the site context and clients brief to develop our ideas.’
