Pre-fabricated housing has such a bad image in Ireland. It labours under the heavy legacy of Ballymun's tower blocks and the appalling "low-cost" schemes built in the early 1970s. And yet it is only by looking again at prefabrication that we can hope to meet housing demand over the next 10 years.

In Austria, incredibly, 30 per cent of the houses built over the past three years have been "prefabs" - usually made from local timber, which is regarded as being the best in Europe for construction because it grows so slowly. And all of these houses meet much stricter building regulations than apply in Ireland.

Prospective purchasers, usually with their own sites, can order a house to their own specifications or settle for one of the standard designs. Either way, they can be confident of moving into their new homes three months later; indeed, most houses can be erected in a week and weathersealed in one day.

None of them look pre-fabricated either. At the Blaue Lagune (blue lagoon) sales centre on the outskirts of Vienna, next door to Austria's largest business park, 65 showhouses built by different companies are on view to the public. Laid out around a lake (the "blue lagoon"), they constitute a permanent Ideal Homes Exhibition.

The houses are mostly traditional-style, with the gable fronts, decorative bargeboards and overhanging eaves so characteristic of Austria. For those seeking something more "showy", or even vulgar, there are models with mansard roofs clad in glazed terracotta tiles and even the odd antebellum portico.

The largest house at the Blaue Lagune is called Tara, after Gone With The Wind. Built by Brauchl, one of the leading Austrian producers of timber pre-fabricated housing, it has a floor area of 260 sq m (2,800 sq ft) - bigger, even, than the most lavish Cosgrave homes at Ardilea Wood that sold recently for £1.5 million-plus.

Bright and airy, and remarkably cool on the hot day we visited, Klaus Jurgen Heinrich, of Brauchl, said Tara could be built for around £300,000 at current prices, excluding site cost. If the customer was in Ireland, transporting the house and its Austrian builders overland would add around £100,000 to the price-tag - still very good value.

The average pre-fabricated timber house is much smaller, at around 800 to 1,000 sq ft, but every house is guaranteed for at least 80 years and all of them have an F-60 fire rating - twice as high as the Irish standard. (What this means is that the occupants have 60 minutes to get out before the building is engulfed by fire). None of the timber is chemically treated and there is also an emphasis on using passive solar energy and natural ventilation. Many Brauchl houses have double-height (and doubleglazed) conservatories, integrated into the structure, with a patented fresh-air well to "optimise the domestic climate", as the company puts it.

Brauchl has built some 5,000 houses in Austria, inspired by a philosophy of creating a natural healthy living environment offering "holistic comfort". The company's concept is naturintegriertes Bauen und Wohnen (nature-integrated building and living), based on using "pure Austrian resources", which are abundantly available.

Only natural materials are used - laminated spruce for the structure, plaster or larch for the exterior skin and 14 centimetres of chemical-free sheep's wool for thermal insulation. Though considerably more costly than fibreglass, high-density polystyrene and even mineral wool, it is said to offer "remarkable insulation values".

A 1996 study by the Technical University of Vienna found that Brauchl houses insulated with sheep's wool performed better than all other tested houses with the lowest energy demand for space heating over a 30-year period.

Andreas Einhauer, sales manager of Villgrater Naturprodukte, which produces the insulation material in East Tyrol, says it helps houses to "breathe" more naturally. When he used sheep's wool for his own apartment atop the family home near Lienz, "people thought I was for the birds, but now they can see and feel for themselves".

For him, it's all about the difference between sick and healthy buildings, as well as the practicalities of providing a home that is warm in winter and relatively cool in summer. The ambient temperature throughout the year is 18 to 20 degrees and, though the apartment is large (140 sq m), it uses only 850 litres of fuel per year for heating.

Mr Einhauer sees Ireland as a potential growth area for pre-fabricated timber houses. He was not at all impressed by the standard of new homes here. "Irish people earn more and more money and I believe they will want better quality houses," he said.

Unterluggauer, a long-established timber building company in Lienz, has already built one house near Oranmore, Co Galway, for German-born translators Martin Beuster and his wife, Ulrike Fuhrer. Designed for them by Duncan Stewart, its Y-plan consists of three hexagons grouped around a hexagonal entrance hall.

The technicians operating Unterluggauer's AutoCAD computers must have been driven spare by all the angles, as well as the complexity of the roof structure, but they managed to make sense of it. All the timber was cut to size and, together with the windows and doors, the whole lot was transported to Ireland for erection on the clients' site.

Featured on the Our House series on RTE television, the completed house is an advertisement for the advantages of prefabrication. It shows that the Austrian building companies can manufacture houses to any design. And it doesn't have to be traditional; we saw one very modern house built by Brauchl in a village near Vienna.

Unterluggauer builds around 40 to 50 "log houses" a year, plus 20 to 25 pre-fabricated timber frame houses. The company has been in business since 1910 and is still run by members of the same family. Recent projects have included a three-storey apartment building, pre-fabricated in five weeks and erected in less than a month.

"Craftsmanship, professional skills and the enthusiasm for working with timber have been handed down through the generations," the company's brochure proudly proclaims. Some 40 skilled craftsmen produce the houses at its factory in Lienz, using timber which has been felled in winter when the moisture content is low.

Both Brauchl and Unterluggauer are interested in the Irish market, even examining the prospects of opening a factory here in a joint venture with some Irish company. One issue they both accept is vital to resolve is the compelling need to adapt Austrian pre-fabricated timber houses to the Irish climate, particularly driving rain.

Contact list

Unterluggauer's agent in Ireland is Steiner Construction, Rockforest, Tubber, Co Clare.

Telephone: 091-633264. e-mail: steinerconstruction@tinet.ie

Further information may be obtained from Herwig Schenk, Austrian Embassy, Merrion Hall, Strand Road, Dublin 4.

Telephone: 01-2830488. e-mail: ahstdub@indigo.ie