Cheap flights give us easy access to European and far flung holiday destinations. We have access to products from every corner of the world, with supermarkets offering tropical fruit in the height of winter. As our rapidly developing world depletes the oil and gas we rely on, at a time where spiralling emissions leave our climate teetering on the brink of disaster, it's becoming increasingly apparent that we have to urgently reassess our way of life. Nowhere will this be more evident than in how and where we build our homes.

To make life viable in the coming years, we need to build our homes within self-sufficient communities, where people don't have to expend much energy to get about their day-to-day lives.

The end of cheap energy will not only affect our homes in terms of location, but will also have a drastic impact on how they're designed and constructed. It might surprise, but the future of Irish homes is destined to be low-tech in many ways.

Many fundamental principles of good building design, which have been ignored in the age of cheap energy, will come to the fore. Already our planners and architects are starting to wake up to the impact a building's orientation has on its performance.

The home of the future will be oriented with large glazed areas leading into open-plan living spaces on the southern aspect to make the most of passive solar gains. Orienting our buildings towards the sun will not just offer us free heat, but will help lower our electricity bills, with more natural light reducing the need to switch on lights. Our homes will also be designed with minimal glazing on the northern aspects, where bathrooms and storage rooms will be located.

The need for greater insulation will radically affect the construction of homes, with attempt to create unbroken barriers of insulation spanning floors, walls and roofs. We'll see walls built off-site with insulation pre-fitted, or systems like insulating concrete formwork, where the concrete wall is poured into a shell of insulation on site.

The home of the future will be airtight internally and windtight externally, ensuting thatnmdraughts are eliminated from external wall and roof. For this reason, the much loved but unenergy-efficient chimney will be designed out of our homes. If the chimney is to survive at all, it must be well-insulated and sealed when not in use. As we make our homes better insulated and airtight, we'll also have to change how we ventilate, with an emphasis on controlled ventilation rather than the very crude holes in walls we've grown accustomed to.

The home of the future will use renewable energy sources such as solar panels, wood pellets or heat pumps. Renewable energy will also become the norm for electricity generation, including wind turbines, solar electric panels and biomassbased combined heat and power systems, which generate electricity and heat.

Following widespread application across continental Europe, renewable energy-based district heating systems, where a single heat source pipes heat to a number of buildings will become common place for larger developments.

The end of cheap energy will also have an impact on the materials homes are constructed from. It will become uneconomical to import materials from afar due to high oil and gas prices, which will also force the industry to switch to lowenergy, low-carbon forms of production.

Natural products such as timber and crops like hemp will become staples of construction. The concrete industry will respond by reducing its carbon emissions, recycling the fly ash from power stations and steel manufacturing.

Homes of the future will be physically linked to the past, incorporating materials salvaged from old buildings, and a new eco-manufacturing industry using recycled newspaper for insulation, recycled polymers and tyres for cladding, decking, roofing and recycled metals for a range of uses. We'll even recycle water from showers, washing machines and dishwashers to flush our toilets, and harvest rainwater for drinking and bathing.

Whether we like it or not, a changing world will have a huge effect on the types of homes we live in. Sustainable building is shedding its associations with sandals and lentils and chest-beating environmentalism, and is already starting to have an impact on new Irish homes. The quicker we embrace this transition, the brighter our future will be.

Jeff Colley is the editor of Construct Ireland; www. constructireland. ie