'We need some texture in our lives – it's time to rehabilitate pebbledash'

‘Now I’m going to start dashing,’ says the guy on YouTube. Watching him grab handfuls of pebbles and throw them expertly at the still-wet slurry with a flick of the wrist, it is clear this is an art, with richness and depth. Moreover, it is an art that has the power to connect buildings with their place using just a scattering of local stone.

Not that it normally does – bags of pebbles can come from anywhere.

I have a kind of geeky fascination with pebbledash, so bad it is good. That is how pebbledash has been considered for so long (too long?).

Picture swathes of suburban semis encased in the rough dull brown, in the front garden a hopeless mattress smothering weeds. The back ends of coastal towns in decline, inhabitants peering bleakly out past pebbledash and PVC to the wind and rain. Economically erected concrete-panel garages with a spattering of sharp stones. It was a useful cover up for spalling brickwork and uncoordinated joints.

But let’s go back to its romantic history: of harling in Scotland, where pebbles and other aggregates were mixed into the render and safeguarded the structures below – as on the RIAS Award-winning Fairburn Tower, 10 miles west of Inverness, where pink harling has brought back a stone ruin as a fairytale castle.

Or to Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s elegant Hill House, outside Glasgow. You can trace an optimistic line through Norman Shaw and the Arts and Crafts movement and see the harling and roughcast mix morphing into pebbledash as it is translated from country homes to philanthropic workers’ housing at Port Sunlight on Merseyside – where the precisely cut hedges offset cottagey leaded windows, oversized chimneys and deep, asymmetrical roofs. Here, pebbledash reads as a reference to a bucolic past rather than a suburban and council house future.

A textured future

At a time when the widespread results of a trend towards cladding, and overcladding, in smooth, coloured render (and minimal drip details) has familiarised us all with water stains and grubbiness, it is cheering to think there are other options. In the course of a week, chats with two people at the forefront of architecture showed how the techniques of pebbledash and its architectural language are actively developing.

Both were at fairly early design stages, exploring how local stones could be co-opted as the pebbles of pebbledash, grounding and enlivening their projects; a house and a culture centre. Could chalk or flint enter the mix when designing a stone’s throw from the white cliffs of Beachy Head? The pieces might be larger than the 3-8mm standard, they might add intensity of colour with granite, or brightness and glint with quartz.

Perhaps they could be made from the leftovers of quarrying larger format stones. Could the stones’ grading and size also vary from top to bottom? Maybe they will end up being something closer to a roughcast or harling, or limewashed.

Experimenting could bring something quite different to pebbledash, if practices are brave (or foolhardy) enough to call it that. We should all be relieved to get some local texture back into the super-smooth architecture of the 21st century.