In a hidden corner of northwest Ireland, the hills are noticeably greener. In the region where Co Sligo meets Co Leitrim, self-builders have been doing their bit for Mother Earth, buying affordable plots of land and building eco-friendly family homes using sustainable methods.
The area became an eco-hub by accident. Each natural builder was working alone, at the end of a remote boithrin or in a secluded field, mainly unaware of the activities of like-minded neighbours. By 2010, when Jo Lewis founded Inspirational Homes, a website that documented sustainably built dwellings in the area, she had plenty of material to work with. Green Door weekend, which takes place from Friday to next Sunday, is an offshoot of that project. It offers the chance for would-be sustainable builders and the curious public to talk to the eco-minded homeowners.
“What all of these homes have in common are sustainable features. Some are built with mud and earth, many have their own self-sustaining gardens, rainwater harvesting systems, natural insulation, solar panels, and so on. Often the house designs are amazing as well,” says Lewis, who has lived in a sustainable renovation in Co Leitrim with her partner, Mike Harris, for 12 years.
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The rural Co Sligo home of Rebecca and Paul O’Connor is on the Green Door tour for the first time this year. It is a prime example of what can be achieved when you want to dispense with chemicals and carbon-heavy materials but still want a beautiful, contemporary dwelling.
Inside, its interior has none of the “crusty” connotations associated with terms such as “eco”, “hemp” or, heaven forbid, “hippie”. Designer fabrics, cool wallpapers and metro tiles live happily alongside a kitchen hand-crafted from a mix of Ikea and salvaged woods, while the dining-room table is carved from local sycamore and the benches are salvaged Georgian doors. Even the pendant kitchen lampshade is a polished washing machine drum retrieved from a skip.
“At its heart is an old cottage and we’ve wrapped our extensions around it,” says Rebecca O’Connor, an artist and art psychotherapist. “The front was south-facing but with tiny windows, so we redesigned this aspect to have lots of glass, and this heats the house for six months of the year and was a big part of making it semi-passive,” she says.
With its cedar cladding, from the outside the house has a whiff of an old American barn or classic Canadian cabin. The couple built the house in stages over six years in an effort to be financially sustainable. “We didn’t want a mortgage. We’ve been working on it as we could afford to.”
They grow their own vegetables, and Paul invented a rainwater harvesting system that makes the water drinkable. They also built a reed-bed filtration system that makes the house’s waste water safe to return to the water table. “I hope when people see our home, they’ll see that this is possible, even if you don’t have professional building skills. This kind of life is possible in Ireland.”
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As well as private house visits, the weekend will include tours of sustainable public buildings such as Leitrim county council's offices and the Department of Agriculture’s headquarters. There will also be workshops.
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Lewis practises what she preaches. Her self-built home is an old stone cottage with a straw-bale extension. “We moved here for the good life, I suppose you’d call it,” she says. Harris, an accomplished eco-builder, did much of the work. “There’s something so nice about renovating an old cottage and keeping it,” says Lewis.
The south-facing side of the house was not the one with the stunning view of which Lewis was so fond. “Mike insisted we build our glazing south facing, rather than on the north-facing side that would frame the view. But he was so right — it’s far more important to have the solar gain than the view. Always face south.”
As a result, the house is partially heated by the sun and features a host of eco-friendly measures, from the bright-red Marmoleum floor, made from natural linseed, to a green roof, wood-fired heating, a composting lavatory, and the family’s vegetable garden, polytunnel and fruit trees.
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The Skreen, Co Sligo home of Feile Butler, an architect, and Colin Ritchie, a carpenter, is perhaps the best known in the region, after it almost won the RTE reality television competition Home of the Year this spring. The couple are accomplished eco-builders and run workshops, a build consultancy and architectural services for natural builders through their company Mud and Wood (mudandwood.com).
“When it was on Home of the Year, I think people saw it and it normalised it for them. Suddenly the family and friends of people who were thinking of building this way were no longer seen as demented,” says Butler. “We wanted to demonstrate that natural building can lead to a valid, contemporary home that stands up well next to conventional construction methods and materials.”
From the outside, Butler and Ritchie's cob house is strikingly curvaceous and rooted in nature, but at the same time is a decidedly 21st-century building. It is a house with little “embodied energy”, meaning locally sourced materials were used wherever possible.
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More than half of the house was built using soil from the site, teamed with straw to become cob. No transportation was involved, making it the poster house for the “slow-build” method. “Natural building is a bit like the slow-food movement, where you buy only local foods when they’re in season. There’s a craftsmanship that comes across. I was thrilled that the RTE judges said that they could feel the passion and love we had put into building,” says Butler.
The finished product is a cosy, characterful home that has an abundance of glazing for passive solar gain. There’s a grass roof, a rainwater harvesting system, low-flow showers. There is no fridge — food is kept cool in a cold store built into a north wall. The furniture is handmade from wind-fallen trees.
Sligo and Leitrim are no strangers to evolved architecture. The region had already attracted one of Ireland’s most interesting architects, Dominic Stevens, whose Mimetic House was designed to be as unobtrusive in the landscape as possible, its mirror-like exterior reflecting the field on which it stands. His own Co Leitrim home, a “€25,000 self-build house”, will be open this weekend, with tours with the architect.
Butterfly House, also in Co Leitrim, is a contemporary addition to a farmhouse by LiD Architecture, which makes nods to the surrounding colour palette, as well as echoing the angles of neighbouring buildings. It won the Architectural Association of Ireland Best Extension award in 2012.
“Green Door is an important thing for all of us as a community, to show that the countryside in Ireland isn’t just an appendage of a local town or city. We have our own voice,” says Lewis.
For the Green Door Weekend brochure and event listings, see inspirationalhomes.ie