In 2000, founder Ben Kerr and business partner Ross Eckersley saw a gap in the market for more innovative and distinct surfaces. They started selling pebbles off the back of a truck in Melbourne – and that’s how Eco Outdoor was born. Today, the company operates in Australia, New Zealand and the USA, but the same resolve underpins its ethos – and the recently released sawn Stone Brick, a lower-carbon challenger to the traditional fired-clay format, is a pretty good example.

Here, Ben explains why embracing natural materials rather than fighting against them is so crucial, unpacks the impact of short‑termism and reveals why it’s in the space between passion and permanence – rather than a rigid checklist – that the most sustainable buildings are created.

Congratulations on more than 25 years of Eco Outdoor, Ben. How has your philosophy evolved since those early days?

From the beginning, it was about embracing natural materials, not working against them. For us, that’s authenticity, and it’s core to who we are. The real question is always what the best product is for a particular environment, a piece of architecture and the way someone wants to live.

Take travertine as an example. We don’t bleach it, fill it or over‑process it into something it isn’t. Travertine is born in hot springs and has fossils and history baked into it, so our job is to cut it simply and let that character come through. Then, in Florence, for example, you see calm, uniform Pietra Serena sandstone combined with lively handmade terracotta, and that pairing gives the architecture its energy. Materials can truly carry history and emotion, and shape how buildings are experienced. In fact, Steve Jobs talked about falling in love with Pietra Serena when he spent time in Florence, and that emotional connection carried all the way through to the stone used in Apple’s retail stores years later.

So, we like to understand those patterns and then ask how the same stone can be expressed differently today – as cladding, flooring or a brick – while staying true to what it naturally wants to be.

Essential to this idea of embracing a natural material’s most authentic state is – to borrow a culinary reference – Eco Outdoor’s “nose‑to‑tail” approach to using the whole stone block, which challenges the conventional way quarries have treated variation and waste. How did this philosophy lead to Stone Brick, your new 100% natural stone brick format?

If you truly value a resource, you feel an obligation to use all of it – for me, that’s the heart of sustainability. Stone is as old as the planet, so wasting half a block feels inherently wrong.

In a typical quarry, you’ll have very clear layers – different stratifications with slightly different tones and performance. Traditionally, a quarry might “clean the quarry” to get to a very uniform tone, putting aside the blocks with more variation.

What they’re after is purer colour, but, from our point of view, the natural variation in material that may otherwise become waste is actually an opportunity – and it’s the perfect input for a brick format because we don’t actually want it to be perfect. We cut it very simply, minimise processing and embrace the variation rather than fighting it. We like the tonal shifts you get when you blend across those strata; you end up with a product that has real character and also makes economic and environmental sense for the quarry. And because we’re not constrained by clay brick moulds, we can move towards longer, thinner proportions, which architects find very appealing.

Fundamentally, we’re not doing anything radically new – stone has built cathedrals and cities for centuries. What we’re doing is re‑interpreting a natural resource, using more of it, and offering it in a familiar format that architects and builders already know how to work with.

Let’s pivot to things that can feel less familiar – or even confusing. Designers face stringent compliance requirements, a flood of EPDs and LCAs and single‑metric claims around embodied carbon. None of this is easy to navigate. What is the very first question you’d ask to work out whether a material is truly the best and most sustainable choice in the long run?

For us, it comes down to three big ideas: longevity, valuing the resource and carbon – but in that order.

First is to build for longevity and think in terms of service life. How long is the building going to be there, and how long will the material perform and still feel appropriate? That’s why we offer a 100‑year warranty on our bricks – they shouldn’t date stylistically, and they shouldn’t fail technically. If you’re pulling something out after ten or fifteen years, it doesn’t matter how good the initial environmental credentials looked on paper.

Second is to value the resource. The idea behind matching the material to the right application is that you don’t create unnecessary waste, and you work with the material rather than forcing it into a format it doesn’t want to be. That might mean, for instance, accepting random lengths in stone instead of chasing a very tight square module that drives a huge amount of off‑cut waste.

Third is to understand and reduce carbon – but never in isolation. Carbon in extraction, processing and transport is critical, and we’re committed to being transparent about that. But it isn’t the only metric. A slightly higher‑carbon product that lasts a century and is loved might be better, in reality, than a low‑carbon product that’s ripped out in a decade.

So, if I were an architect, I’d start by asking whether this material will still feel appropriate and desired in thirty, fifty or a hundred years, whether the resource is being genuinely respected – and then how far its carbon profile can be reduced without compromising those first two questions.

Let’s zoom in on the idea of compromise – or, rather, lack of. You’ve mentioned that while Eco Outdoor isn’t ideologically against carbon offsets, you’ve focused your sustainability efforts on real action in extraction and production instead. Why is that so important to you?

I’m a big believer that private enterprise should actively solve problems, not just pay to neutralise them. If we focus on offsets, we might feel better, but we haven’t really changed anything about the way we work – offsets have a role in putting a price on carbon and nudging behaviour, but they don’t actually improve how we extract, process or move materials.

Now, if we focus on lower‑carbon extraction and production, smarter logistics and using the whole block through products like Stone Brick, we’re forced to address the actual levers we control. We’re looking at things like how we can use the last bits of a material – can we crush it and turn it into a stone render, for instance – as well as exploring other lower‑carbon systems that still have to be commercially viable and beautiful.

The built environment is responsible for a huge portion of global carbon emissions, and materials are a big slice of that. The harder challenge – and the one we’re interested in – is finding that intersection where commercial considerations, aesthetic outputs and sustainability outcomes are all strong at the same time. If you can’t get all three, it won’t scale.

Cost is often cited as a barrier to adopting sustainable solutions at scale. How can shifting our view of a building’s lifespan – and enforcing long‑term accountability – solve the cost‑versus‑sustainability debate?

One of my real frustrations with the current housing market is short‑termism – there’s a structural bias towards “build to sell” and ten‑year thinking, when a building’s real value horizon is well over fifty years.

We’ve been really inspired by models like Home.Earth in Denmark – which Rasmus Nørgaard, the founder, spoke about at our recent People, Planet and Profit industry panel – where the developer retains the asset for half a century. When you know you’ll own and maintain a building for that long, you design and specify very differently because you care about operating costs, defects and maintenance cycles in a much more profound way. Contrast that with a pure build‑to‑sell model, where your mindset is primarily about your return at settlement – and you naturally drift towards short‑term decision‑making.

If you run the numbers over a longer timeframe, things start to look different. Land and labour are huge expenses, whereas materials are actually a relatively small percentage of the total project cost. With that in mind, I don’t think materials are the place to aggressively value‑manage – they’re the part of the building people touch, see and live with every day, and often the component that will outlast everything else.

If you treat a building as a long‑term cultural and financial asset, rather than just a short‑term investment, the conversation about cost shifts naturally.

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We’re leaving our readers with a lot to think about. What’s the one thing you’d encourage them to do to help foster a more sustainable built environment?

Start with passion and permanence, not with a checklist. Design the best architecture you can that’s appropriate to its place and that you genuinely believe should last forever. Get the scale, form and program right for the people who will live or work there, and then choose a small, coherent palette of materials that best expresses that idea, making sure those materials are sourced and used responsibly.

We’ve all walked into buildings around the world where you just think, “I want to spend time here.” Those are often the most sustainable buildings, because they’re loved, used and maintained, not torn down. The best building is a building that is well loved and well used. If we start there – with passion, authenticity and a long view – and then layer on rigorous sustainability thinking, we get to much better outcomes than if we start with metrics alone.

Designing with passion, building for permanence: Q&A with Eco Outdoor’s Ben Kerr

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