Building In The Garden: Building a house in the grounds of his parents' home got one man the pad he always wanted, but it took five years to complete what turned out to be a demanding project. Eoin Lyons reports.

Living beside your parents mightn't be the way most men would approach going about getting their first home but, for Jason Lawless, there were a few sound reasons for doing so.

Jason, in his early 30s and working for the architecture and design firm Duff Tisdall, always wanted to build his own house, but knew that he would never be able to afford land close to the city.

Five years ago he started the process of building a house in the garden of his parents, Patti and Kevin, in Clontarf.

While theirs is a straightforward suburban house, it has a garden that wraps around the side of the building, making such a project possible.

After applying for planning permission twice and eight months of construction, the house was completed one year ago and, although it looks fairly nondescript from the exterior, inside is a reflection of Jason's taste.

This is the second reason for building next door to home.

He has a great interest in design: "One of the reasons I wanted to build was that I didn't want to go into a normal three-bedroom house - I wanted to be able to do my own thing and make something in my own style."

Doing his own thing with the building doesn't seem to have infringed on his need to do his own thing with his life - without his parents looking on from next door. It helps that they get on so well and that he had lived away from home before approaching them with the idea.

"At the start it was going to be a temporary thing to get me started," he says, "but then, as we went along, it started to become more permanent."

He admits that when he first moved in to the new house, no one knew how the proximity was going to work out, but a year later, things are going well.

"People ask how could I live beside my parents," says Jason, "but we have our own space and don't intrude on that. We'd never really visit each other unannounced."

While the inside has many unusual design features, such as a metal bridge dividing an open-roofed living area, the outside is purposefully unobtrusive.

"Because I was building on my parents' land," says Jason, "I didn't want to take away from their house. I wanted it to look mature, as if it had always been there."

To this end he used aged brick from the specialist brick suppliers, IB Stock, in Ranelagh.

Because of the lengthy planning process he had more time than most to plan and organise every detail of the building work, which may be why is was finished so quickly.

The house has separate utilities - water, electricity, plumbing and so on - from his parents' house and planning permission has been granted to open a gate from the side wall next to Jason's house.

"It will give me more independence," says Jason, "so we're not sharing the same driveway and we can then build a wall to separate the two houses completely."

Jason says he came close to giving up over the course of the five years.

"It was a long time to wait for your first home and there were many times I felt it wasn't going to happen.

"It would have been easier just to buy a house or apartment. Property prices rose and I probably would have made money if I had invested what I had earlier."

But be that as it may, the end result more than speaks for itself: he got the home he always wanted, one with lots of style and one far from the straightforward suburban three-bedroom semi-d.