Harrison Gardner, master builder, broadcaster, author and champion of sustainable living, built his own family home in rural west Clare. Donal O'Donoghue stopped by for a chat.
"Most everything we own is second-hand," says Harrison Gardner. "Not least the clothes I’m wearing."
The eco-builder, author and broadcaster could also add the sofa he is sitting on, much of the furniture in his home, even the home itself. "When it comes to these pieces of furniture, which I’ve either made or inherited, they all have a history or a story and that’s what makes them special," he says.
"Now when I give someone a tour of my house it can be very long as I have to explain where everything came from or how it was made and what we have done with it. The kitchen table is the first piece of furniture I made in Ireland. Then I brought it here and we used it as scaffolding to build the whole house."
Harrison has just given me a tour of his quirky home, rebuilt from the guts of a derelict cottage and outbuildings, in rural west Clare. He lives here with his wife, Erin, and their two children, Inari (5) and Isla (2). "It’s a long way from the Central Coast," I suggest to the native Australian, adding that I’ve just heard my first cuckoo of the summer in the county he now calls home.
"When the weather is like this, I can’t imagine being anywhere else," says the well-travelled Gardner as we sit at the table he built, and drink black leaf tea. Following the house tour, from the bathroom with a concrete washbasin, shaped using an old wok, to the kids’ room with a loft net, we talk about what was, is and will be, in a converted outbuilding that will become his office and a podcast studio from where he will further spread the word on sustainable possibilities.
In 2022, Harrison Gardner rocked into the public arena with his debut TV series, Build Your Own Home and the publication of his first book, Build Your Own (subtitled: 'use what you have to create what you need’). Both TV show and book distilled and dispensed a lifetime of know-how and can-do.
"I basically grew up on a building site," he says of his early years in New South Wales, where his parents, accomplished DIYers, were building their own home, and imparting the knowledge to their three boys (Harrison is the youngest). He subsequently criss-crossed the world, a "garbage warrior" working on projects that championed sustainability. "Eight years ago, I bought this property on five acres with two friends," he says. "Then I met Erin, we bought out my friends and we started turning it into a home."
Even now, he finds it difficult to throw things away. And people are always giving him stuff. "Two weeks ago, I got a whole kitchen worth of solid oak doors that were being replaced by something made of plastic," he says. "I’ve no idea what I’m going to do with them but it is beautiful wood and so I’ll have to do something with them." I imagine he will.
"We now have a three-bedroom house for our two kids and us," he says. "The house is big enough so now we need to look at the food and the gardens. There will be a small glasshouse, some chickens, a vegetable patch and that’s a whole new world for me. I spend my days teaching people to build their own homes and be more resilient, but if I want to have food security myself, I need to know the basics of growing my own."
Resilience is key for Harrison Gardner. "If we get another storm like we did in January with Éowyn, I can flick over to the storage battery and the house will stay running," he says. "It’s not about being sustainable really, it’s about being resilient so that no matter what happens, whether that’s another storm or a dramatic rise in oil prices or another war breaks out, we can handle it.
"I’m still happily plugged into the grid and using all those resources but what I want is back-up systems so that when something goes wrong our house still works. We use a pellet boiler to heat the whole house: underfloor heating, our radiators, our hot water, everything. And if the pellet stove breaks down, we still have three wood-fired stoves throughout the house. I also want to use more rainwater and maybe drill a well."
Gardner is one of the founders of Common Knowledge, a non-profit social enterprise with a HQ near Lisdoonvarna. "By encouraging and teaching people to make things themselves, we are helping them to stop being purely consumers and starting to be creators and makers and that changes how you look at the world," he says.
It also changes how you live in the world, just as it has changed Gardner, whose philosophy is focused on community – he essentially recruited a meitheal of friends to help build his home, while Common Knowledge is essentially a community.
"If I or any of the founders leave, it will go on," he says. "We have a 30-bed guesthouse that we have been slowly fixing up as well as a great classroom space and a thriving workshop running courses on self-build and sustainability."
Later this year, Gardner will host a second series of Build Your Home on RTÉ ("We are just wrapping filming on six different projects"). He will also publish another book, Our Homes. "It's a book about other ways to solve the country’s housing crisis," he says.
"It looks at the myriads of ways that we can approach housing in Ireland. We tend to get stuck in a binary style solution, but I wanted to remind people that there are many ways to approach this problem. Social housing alone is not going to solve Ireland’s housing crisis, so I offer five or six different ways to try and solve the problem. The book illustrates these different approaches, and I also interview people from all over the world who are doing it and what they have learned."
Harrison Gardner is also still learning, building for the future. When I arrived at his home, he was on a call to the University of Limerick, where he is working to develop the know-how that will make sheep’s wool – which is currently left to rot or dumped – suitable for use as insulation for houses.
"We also want to create a machine that separates the lanolin (wool fat) from the water after scouring and that can be used for treating wood or greasing tools or whatever." In other words, nothing goes to waste, and it solves the urgent problem of what to do with Irish sheep wool, which has no real market value.
‘Using what you have to create what you need’ – the subtitle of Gardner’s book and the cornerstone of his ethos. "I’m not scared for the future," he says, "but we will need to change our ways and find alternative solutions to be ready for it."
Further information on Common Knowledge and Harrison Gardner at ourcommonknowledge.org and harrisongardner.net
