When the Prince of Wales wanted to mark the millennium with a private chapel at Highgrove, his country house in Gloucestershire, he chose the architect Charles Morris to oversee its design and build. Morris suggested to the prince that they build in clay lump made from the soil of his farm and looked to his office partner and clay-building expert Dirk Bouwens.
Stepping up to the brief, Dirk modified the clay-rich soil, supervised the puddling (trampling the clay, sand and straw with water to form clay lumps) and designed the 37 different moulds needed for the quatrefoil building. With its clay lump barrel-vaulted roof it looked like something out of ancient Egypt and became known as the prince’s “sanctuary”.
Dirk was an old-fashioned figure who embraced traditional methods rather than modern power tools — he used a scythe rather than a Strimmer on the long grass in his garden. He was passionate about the qualities of chalky boulder clay, the soil from which clay lump, Norfolk’s answer to Devon’s cob, was made. Its thermal properties allow it to provide a cool interior in the summer and a warm one in the winter and, being air-dried, the clay bricks need no firing.
After several years supervising the maintenance of earth buildings in Norfolk, in 1994 Dirk set up the East Anglian Regional Telluric Houses Association (Eartha), to promote the conservation and proper repair of clay buildings.
Dirk was born in 1947 in Bournemouth, to Derek and Doreen (née Gaskin). His mother was appointed MBE for services to the community in Shepperton, Middlesex, and Dirk was the second of four, with an older sister Phillipa and two younger brothers Adrian and Carel. The family soon moved to Littleton, a village in Middlesex, where the children enjoyed an idyllic childhood of swimming in rivers and riding ponies. At the age of seven Dirk went to board at Old Buckenham Hall, a prep school in Suffolk, and from there went on to King’s College School, Wimbledon.
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At school he was known for his artistic sensibilities — and later, as a chartered surveyor, he would produce exquisite designs for buildings — and yet a career in accountancy beckoned. However, in his late teens he fell gravely ill and for six months was in and out of hospital before being diagnosed with Addison’s disease. When he was back on his feet he decided to switch to a career as a chartered surveyor.
After training with an estate agency in Spelthorne, Middlesex, Dirk moved to Norfolk in the early 1970s and was introduced to Morris at a lunchtime drinks party. Recognising in each other a shared love of buildings, they agreed to work side by side in an office in Morris’s garden shed at East Harling. Supportive of each other’s projects and yet operating with separate clients and assistants, they spent the next 25 years in fruitful professional harmony.
During that time Dirk was often called abroad to share his knowledge of historic building methods and he attended workshops in New Mexico, Mallorca, Portugal, Mali and Gotland in Sweden. From 2003 to 2009 he worked for Norfolk county council, where he was involved in the Norfolk Windmills Trust’s preservation of Broads drainage mills. He was instrumental in returning Polkey’s Mill at Reedham to full working order.
Dirk’s first marriage was in 1974 but it ended after a year and a half and by the end of the decade he had met and married Anna Preston, who worked in fashion and interior design. She owned a houseboat on the Thames in Chelsea in bad repair that Dirk set about rebuilding, and they bonded over a shared love of art and architecture. In 1981 they had their only child, Tom, who works in renewable heating.
Dirk raised his son with swings and treehouses that he had built himself and always delighted in the company of children. On his Norfolk “building demonstration” days, he would show them how to dig the clay from the ground and how to trample it before putting it into wooden moulds. The clay bricks would then be removed and allowed to air dry.
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Dirk was a kind-hearted, positive figure, the very sight of whom could make people break into a grin with his customary attire of high-waisted cords and braces, tweed jacket and woollen tie. He took a stoical approach to the personal difficulties that he encountered, of which he spoke little. A year after Tom was born Anna was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and soon after Dirk himself was diagnosed with cancer. It was treated with chemotherapy and the removal of half a lung.
Dirk was a nonconformist, a craftsman, a conservationist and a man of nature, both behind and ahead of his time; part Victorian and part hipster. For many years he could be seen out and about on his three-wheel Triking — half motorbike, half motorcar — which he drove wearing a First World War flying helmet and goggles. For a joke it would sometimes be hidden in a bush by his friends’ children when he went to visit. As an uncle he earned a reputation for eating hard-boiled eggs with the shell on.
For 40 years Dirk had a moustache that he never trimmed, and as its hairs turned grey he plucked them from one side so that the effect was two-tone: half black and half grey. If he had an old-fashioned resilience, he was also easily distracted, not least by those children who would grab the end of his moustache, causing him to growl and bark like a dog.