Branch out in Bandon's €750k eco-friendly home in the trees

Woods inside and outside define low-carbon home Woodsmoke
Branch out in Bandon's €750k eco-friendly home in the trees

Architect Paul Leech of Gaia Ecotecture designed the pioneering Irish A-frame home Woodsmoke to sound eco principles in the mid 1990s. It's stood the test of time, with a light carbon footprint too.

Bandon, West Cork

€750,000

Size

213 sq m (2,300 q ft)

Bedrooms

5

Bathrooms

4

BER

B3

AHEAD of its day at the time, and steeped in eco-features which are only now coming home to roost at a time of planetary distress and climate change concern, is West Cork’s wonderful Woodsmoke.

Woodland setting par excellence in the Castle Bernard Estate
Woodland setting par excellence in the Castle Bernard Estate

This teepee-like A-frame home with a light carbon footprint, low running costs, and utter individuality, is a perfect fit for its glorious green site.

Pitch perfect and sharp angles
Pitch perfect and sharp angles

And, over the quarter century that it has been standing tall, it has been disappearing from sight, a wooden house, comfortably at home in the woods.

Hard to believe this site is on the edge of Bandon town
Hard to believe this site is on the edge of Bandon town

Set in a restored, worked-out quarry on a wooded section of the Castle Bernard Estate replanted 80 years ago with hardwoods and pines, yet only two kms from the centre of Bandon town, Woodsmoke was commissioned in the early 1990s by a local family who tuned in early to ecological issues and concerns.

Solar gain: Juliet balcony in the main, front bedroom overlooks the cone-shaped top of the south-aspected sun room
Solar gain: Juliet balcony in the main, front bedroom overlooks the cone-shaped top of the south-aspected sun room

They had a meeting of minds with architect Paul Leech, of Gaïa Ecotecture, whose other design work spans decades of environmentally-sensitive projects from commercial schemes to schools to private homes.

(Singer Christy Moore bought one of Paul Leech’s ever-individual designs as a down-time bolthole some years back, near Ahakista, complete with reflecting outdoor pond/pool: it's now in new ownership.)

Reed bed and ponds in the front  garden/grounds
Reed bed and ponds in the front  garden/grounds

A change of ownership is due now too, for the first time, at Woodsmoke, as it’s trade-down time for the owner, with adult children far-flung and as yearning for travel to grandchildren, and a new life chapter, beckons.

Sharp and crisp and tall amid the soaring trees at the Bandon end of the Castle Bernard Estate (one-time home of the Early and Countess of Bandon, with the castlellated mansion destroyed by the IRA in 1921) the largely timber-built Woodsmoke looks to be.... well,  at ease and at home with its surrounding woodland setting, over two private, curated acres of it.

The steeply-pitched building, with windows aplenty including stacked ones under roof overlaps and a dramatic conical front sun room and heat sump, has 2,300 sq ft within, with some dramatically shaped rooms,   with sloping external ‘tented’ walls. Its rooms are spread over five levels/half levels with a central stairs and, finally.   a spiral staircase to the uppermost eyrie-like rooms, at tree canopy level.

Study/office with mezzanine library
Study/office with mezzanine library

Wooded inside and outside amid the woods, and largely heated by wood from the 2.25 acre site, Woodsmoke is on the open market with estate agent Michael O’Donovan of Savills guiding the true one-off - true to its day-one eco principles too - at €750,000.

Rightly, Mr O’Donovan describes its design as ‘pioneering’, and as “a mesmerising, architecturally-designed five-bedroom detached house , situated in an ultra-private and enchanting woodland.”

It gets a B3 BER, an amazing result for a building designed and built it the 1990s, but its architect Paul Leech reckons when BER assessments get more refined, to acknowledge a building’s life-cycle life performance, it could do even better than a B3.

South-aspected, naturally warm due to passive solar sunspace and a heat retaining masonry ‘trombe' wall at its front core and cone, and well-insulated, it has a heat pump sourced from sunlit natural ground and reflecting pond water.

This circulates warm water in the building, and is, says ecotect Mr Leech, more efficient than electricity consuming air-to-water pumps.

Water is heated by a large stove in the main living area about seven months of the year, with logs from the grounds where there’s a lovely wood-built barn for storing and drying the corded timber.

Living area
Living area

This warming stove presence, with an aroma of wood-fire, also heats the kitchen/dining area next to the living room with five-metre high apex, and wood-sheeted ceilings/upper walls.

Vine in sun room
Vine in sun room

There’s also access to the lofty apex shaped sun room, currently producing a heavy crop of homburg grapes from a mature vine, with heat-holding tiled floor and air vents for passive warm air circulation.

Kitchen/dining area
Kitchen/dining area

The house’s largely timber construction represent a fraction of the embodied carbon/ 'upfront carbon' of other builds.  As a further mark of near-self-sufficiency, there’s an onsite well with filtration system for water, and a reed-bed downhill from the house and waste tank discretely deals  with treatment of black and grey water.

Roofing is a tile product called Country ‘Eternit,’ which looks like cedar shingles but is hardier (there’s a supply of spares if ever needed) and which appears to be enjoyed by moss in the house clearing’s clean air giving a lovely, soft and mellow ‘green’ look.

Stove burning wood from the grounds heats water seven months of the year
Stove burning wood from the grounds heats water seven months of the year

When it came to site selection for Woodsmoke, a specialist tree survey at the time allowed for sensitive minimal harvesting, and then replanting, to optimally locate the house, which is built of sustainable timber, raised on a north/south axis above ground on minimal concrete stoolings – a light footprint on the planet, in every way.

Woodsmoke has previously featured in a variety of publications, and even got a ‘moment in the sun’ when images and details were exhibited in Paris as part of L'Imaginaire Irlandaise exhibition in the 1990s.

It also featured in the seminal Rural Design Guide produced by Cork County Council via architect Michael Shanahan as an example of sensitive siting of a one-off in the Irish landscape.

If you can work from home.....?
If you can work from home.....?

Woodsmoke has been cited by architects’ body the RIAI as “a successful example of a building whose design stems from its empathy with the site, and its use of natural materials and passive energy. The ecological aspirations have been successfully combined with a sympathetic architectural form to create a building of great visual appeal."

Wine not? Homburg grapes here for the plucking
Wine not? Homburg grapes here for the plucking

A gated entrance, inside the old stone walls of the Castle Bernard Estate which form the eastern site boundary, winds up to the house, with distant guest parking area, and a sheltered car-port integrated into the house’s northern façade, next to an integrated  garage with sloping sliding door.

Internally, there’s flowing natural cadence of space over the many levels, including hall, home office with mezzanine/library, guest bedroom and pantry/utility.

Woodsmoke has a short wooden gangway/bridge to the front door, while the grounds are sustainably managed with walkways, water harvesting, pond, veg and herb beds.

Trees include a giant turkey oak, mature beech, sycamore, cedars, pines and arbutus, all utterly tranquil….and within a walk of a bus stop, Bandon town, schools and the Bandon Golf Club, elsewhere on the Castle Bernard Estate.

VERDICT: At eco-aware Woodsmoke, you can indeed seen the woods from the trees.

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