Convict Blend

Convict Blend is a richly textured blend of three traditional handmade sandstock bricks: Weathered Reclaimed Heritage Red, Reclaimed Heritage Red and Sandstruck Hampton. The blend is our homage to the broad array of colours, textures and weathered appearances found in the convict-era brickwork of Sydney and early colonial New South Wales.

Convict-era brickwork was anything but uniform. Bricks varied considerably according to the clay available, how they were formed, where they sat within the kiln and the temperatures they experienced during firing. More than two centuries of weathering, lime mortar, repairs and exposure have added further variation. The result is the wonderful mixture of reds, terracottas, browns, ochres, creams, charcoals and weathered tones now associated with surviving early Sydney brickwork.

Convict Blend seeks to capture this character rather than reproduce any single historic brick. The lighter Sandstruck Hamptons sit alongside the deeper Reclaimed Heritage Reds and heavily weathered faces, creating the seemingly random colour variation and irregularity that gives old colonial brickwork so much of its visual depth.

All three bricks are handmade sandstocks, with the softly irregular edges, creases, folds, textural variation and subtle differences in size that distinguish traditional handmade bricks from modern, highly uniform production. The objective is not perfection or conformity, but a wall that feels as though its bricks have been drawn from different firings and different moments in Sydney’s early brickmaking history.

As Convict Blend contains three different bricks, a single sample cannot represent the overall blend. When ordering samples, a minimum of three samples must be ordered, allowing us to provide an example of each of the three bricks that make up Convict Blend.