When BIG, the Copenhagen-founded architecture studio led by Bjarke Ingels, chose rammed earth — compressed layers of local soil — as the primary material for its first project in Japan, the decision said more about the state of luxury architecture than about any single building. The project, a trio of villas called Not A Hotel Setouchi on the remote island of Sagishima in the Seto Inland Sea, marks the moment rammed earth completes its migration from ancient vernacular technique to validated luxury material. When a studio of BIG’s scale and global visibility builds a high-end hospitality project from dirt, it isn’t a quirky experiment — it’s a legitimisation that reshapes what the market considers premium.
Danish design meets Japanese terrain
The three villas on Sagishima are designed to emerge from the landscape rather than simply sit on it, integrating with the island’s dramatic topography. Rammed earth, a building technique that compresses layers of natural soil into dense walls, gives the villas a material language rooted in the island’s geology. The effect is architecture that looks ancient and contemporary at once, which is precisely the kind of tension BIG has built its reputation on.
For a studio with a global presence, Japan has been a notable gap in the portfolio. BIG has built in dozens of countries, from waste-to-energy plants in Scandinavia to residential towers in Manhattan. Entering the Japanese market with rammed earth rather than steel and glass feels deliberate — a gesture of material sensitivity toward a country with deep architectural traditions of its own. But it also functions as a statement about where luxury is headed: away from polish, toward geology.
Why rammed earth, and why now
Rammed-earth construction has been gaining traction among architects looking for alternatives to carbon-intensive materials like concrete and steel. The technique is thousands of years old — historical structures including parts of the Great Wall of China were built with it — but it has found new relevance as the architecture industry confronts its environmental footprint. The material absorbs and releases heat slowly, providing natural thermal regulation, and can often be sourced from the building site itself.
BIG’s choice to use rammed earth for a luxury hospitality project on a remote Japanese island crystallises a broader shift in what high-end clients are willing to embrace. The roughness of compressed earth, with its visible striations and mineral variations, was once associated with vernacular or budget-conscious building. Increasingly, it reads as a marker of considered luxury — the architectural equivalent of choosing handmade ceramics over polished porcelain. Rammed earth has had champions for years — studios like Herzog & de Meuron and Rick Joy have used it to striking effect — but those projects circulated primarily within architecture circles. A BIG project on a photogenic Japanese island, developed for a hospitality brand with a built-in media engine, will reach a fundamentally different audience. That reach is what turns a niche material into a legitimate category.
Not A Hotel’s expanding ambitions
The villas are developed under the Not A Hotel brand, a Japanese hospitality company that blurs the line between private residence and hotel. Owners can use their villas as personal retreats or make them available to guests through the platform’s booking system. It’s a model that has been gaining ground across Asia and Europe, combining real estate investment with hospitality revenue.
Choosing BIG for the Sagishima project aligns Not A Hotel with the global design conversation. The Danish studio brings international visibility and a track record of buildings that generate media attention — something a luxury hospitality brand on a remote island needs. But the partnership also reveals something about rammed earth’s new commercial viability: Not A Hotel is not a nonprofit or a research institution. It is a business betting that wealthy clients will pay a premium to sleep inside walls made of compressed island soil. That bet would have been unthinkable a decade ago. The collaboration also reflects the growing exchange between Scandinavian and Japanese design cultures, two traditions that share an emphasis on materiality, restraint, and the relationship between built environments and natural ones.
Scandinavia’s architectural export machine
BIG’s move into Japan fits a broader pattern of Scandinavian architecture firms expanding their global footprint through culturally attuned projects. Snøhetta, another Nordic powerhouse, has been building energy-positive timber structures in France. Other Nordic firms continue to win commissions across Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas.
What distinguishes BIG’s approach in Japan is the willingness to let the local context lead. Rammed earth is a material with deep roots in East Asian and Middle Eastern building culture, and deploying it on a Japanese island rather than importing Scandinavian timber or prefab systems suggests a studio that knows when to adapt. Bjarke Ingels has described BIG’s approach as combining environmental responsibility with pleasure to inhabit. The Sagishima villas seem to take that principle and ground it, quite literally, in Japanese soil. But critically, that adaptation also serves the material’s legitimisation narrative: when a globally recognised firm subordinates its own material vocabulary to an ancient local one, it signals that the local material is worth subordinating to.
The real test ahead
Whether the villas live up to the renderings remains to be seen. Architecture photography has a way of making rammed earth look impossibly smooth and warm, while the reality of construction in a maritime climate presents genuine technical challenges around moisture and erosion. Rammed earth’s journey from vernacular technique to luxury material is not without risk — if the Sagishima walls stain, crack, or erode poorly, the same media attention that legitimised the material will just as quickly frame it as a cautionary tale.
But the ambition is clear: three buildings that want to look like they were always part of the island, designed by a studio from Copenhagen that has spent two decades arguing that architecture should be generous, surprising, and environmentally alert. BIG has made its name through spectacle — ski slopes on rooftops, power plants that blow smoke rings. Choosing compressed soil over engineered spectacle for its Japan debut is a quieter kind of statement, but arguably a more consequential one. Spectacle legitimises the architect. Material choice legitimises the material. If Not A Hotel Setouchi succeeds commercially, expect rammed earth to appear on luxury project briefs from Kyoto to the Côte d’Azur — not because the technique changed, but because the right studio, at the right scale, on the right island, finally made it safe for the market to believe in dirt.
Photo by Javier Balseiro on Pexels