It was designed by Rice himself, a Limerick-based architect, whose brief was to provide a modest contemporary home to a family budget. Rice did such a good job that the project scooped the Opus Building of the Year Award as well as receiving a gong from the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI). The construction method combined a steel portal frame with block build. The result was a startling home which, from the outside, combines vast glazed areas, red cedar wood cladding and steel.

Despite its “modest” brief, the house has four bedrooms and many interlinking open plan reception areas. Most breathtaking of all is the stilted wraparound balcony.

Difficult sites often cost less, but when creative thinking is applied, can actually become a positive feature of the resulting home. Take the home of Dominic and Adrienne McCarthy at the Cooley Penninsula in Co Louth. The couple took the budget up a few notches to €250,000 when they built their detached home on extremely sloped ground.

The house involves two split levels which have been positioned on different parts of the south-facing slope.

The dwelling is broken down into a series of volumes with the upper level comprising a barn-like zinc-clad structure that encloses the open plan areas. The southern, or highest end over the sun lounge, is extensively glazed and wraps around the plastered masonry living room cube.

The lower bedroom block provides a substantial roof terrace for the upper level and is accessed from the sun lounge. The roof terrace connects back to the surrounding landscape by means of a timber decked access bridge.

It exploits the difference between the building and the landscape and provides links via its bridge and terraces.

Then there’s the home of the architect Patrick McCabe and his partner Sarah Kelly, a four-bedroom, part-timber-clad affair in Co Mayo, which has done away with traditional block supports entirely. This home was constructed using a steel portal frame in much the same way a modern barn is constructed. The house cost €180,000, not including the cost of the site.

The design is eyecatching, but simple. Two juxtaposing boxes are located under a butterfly roof which dips 8ft at its mid section and swoops to four metres at the sides. The two boxes are slipped horizontally, providing a covered space at each end of the house.

Perhaps the couple with the most radical home of all are Rick Le Vert and Libby Carton whose 1,250 sq ft house in the Donegal hills resembled the sort of three dimensional shape-bending puzzles popular in 1970s.

They gave their architects Antoin and Tarla MacGabhann carte blanche to be as quirky as they liked for their finished form.

Le Vert and Carton, both graphic designers, had lived in New York, Dublin and Berlin and had been exposed to much unleashed modernism. Their home also had to incorporate their workplace with a good sized studio.

The house consists of a concrete block section containing all the fixed infrastructure, including plumbing, while a timber box with a tin toof links up with the former section through the roof area.

The completed home received an award from the RIAI. The total budget was €170,000.

Apart from showcasing the best of Ireland’s self-build adventurers, Build Your Own House And Home also provides detailed practical sections on relatively new techniques and technologies.

There are sections on finding the right architect and a comprehensive list of RIAI recommended practices which specialise in helping self-builders. There are guides to planning permission, insurance and finance and advice on the benefits of open plan versus capsulated designs.

Alternative sources of energy and environmentally progressive sewage disposal are also covered. Pretty much all you’ll need to know, in fact, before you embark on building your own home — what once was regarded as something of a trial, but is increasingly being regarded by many as the beginning of an exciting adventure.

Consider that for most of the budgets outlined here (between €100,000 and €230,000) every one of the homes featured here looks like something you would normally see in a high-brow glossy designmagazine. Well they’re in one now.

Build Your Own House And Home is published by Dyflin Publications in Association with the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland. It is available in most good newsagents and bookshops, priced €9.95.

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