Innovation is not a word that springs to mind when one thinks of Irish builders and property developers. Cautious, conservative and even reactionary, they have been so slow in taking new ideas on board that even these ideas are already passe by the time they become the norm.

Nowhere is this snail-like progress more glaringly evident than in the field of ecological design. Despite all the hot air about sustainable development, few developers - or, indeed, architects - have been willing to take the plunge into this particular pool, with its strange notions of a greener future.

A trail of sorts was blazed six years ago by Murray O'Laoire's Green Building in Temple Bar, designed in collaboration with Conservation Engineering. But it wouldn't have happened at all without the commitment of key individuals in Temple Bar Properties and the availability of generous EU grant aid.

And though new office blocks are increasingly being designed with natural ventilation instead of energy-wasting air conditioning, there have been few innovations on the residential front apart from Temple Bar's West End and Custom House Square, where apartments are heated by recycling exhaust air from nearby offices.

Unfortunately, residents of the vast bulk of some 15,000 apartments provided in the centre of Dublin over the past decade must depend on inefficient electric storage heaters because penny-pinching developers were too mean to install natural gas. For many, the only greenery is a few token trees or shrubs in the courtyard car-park.

Against that bleak background, the Daintree Building designed by Solearth Ecological Architecture represents a quite exceptional effort to break new ground. Because what it aims to provide is high-density, stylish ecological living on a tight urban site in the centre of Dublin, developed without the aid of a subvention of any kind.

Located on Pleasants Place, just behind Camden Street in the newly dubbed "Village Quarter", the Daintree Building should provide a good example of the kind of low-rise, high-density development that's made possible through mixed uses and layering of activities. (The residential density is equivalent to 60 units per acre.)

As designed, the building contains six large apartments with roof terraces, a paper-craft centre, some office space and a cafe all grouped around an irregularly-shaped courtyard which features a southfacing cascade of terraces and hanging gardens.

It took more than a year to get planning permission for the scheme. Dublin Corporation's planners regarded Pleasants Place as a mews lane behind Camden Street, even though it never had stables and has been lined for years with a random assortment of industrial sheds. They didn't seem to want a new scale to be established here.

After the initial proposal for a four-storey building, with a setback fifth floor, was turned down - a decision confirmed by An Bord Pleanala - Solearth re-designed the scheme at a more realistic three storeys to the lane, with a setback penthouse level, and secured approval, aided by the enthusiasm of deputy city planning officer Dick Gleeson.

Working with another ecologically-orientated practice, Adrian Joyce Architects, and Buro Happold, the progressive structural engineers, Solearth's Brian O'Brien and his small team came up with what they describe as probably the first multi-storey timber-framed building in Ireland for more than 75 years - topped off with a curving, grass-covered roof.

The roof is, of course, an emblem for the "green-ness" of the building, but residents won't have to worry about mowing it every month because the type of grass - sedum - doesn't get very long. "We're quite keen that it would look like a designed object, not something covered by a crazy, hairy thing", says Mr O'Brien.

South-facing solar panels are designed in, rather than as an afterthought. During the summer, they will produce more hot water than the building's users need, so the excess will be pumped into hot tubs on the roof terraces. In winter, the panels will be supplemented by heat pumps drawing geothermal water from a depth of 20 metres.

The building will also have polished earth floors, re-using soil excavated from the site, with hot water pipes running through them to provide underfloor central heating. Internal walls will be done in tinted clay plaster, and organic paints are to be used throughout.

The six apartments are all different, ranging from a single-bedroom unit to a three-bedroom penthouse with four two-bedroom units (each with a floor area of 70 sq m) in between. At street level, the developer, Daintree Paper Ltd, will have a new paper-craft workshop while the "micro" cafe will spill out on to the courtyard.

One side of this small courtyard is lined with what the architects call a "green gantry", which is to be made from the bamboo scaffolding erected last autumn in front of the Carlton cinema in O'Connell Street, as the rather unremarkable IMMA/Nissan Art Project for 2000; it was originally intended to dump the lot in a landfill site.

The ground-level of this gantry will have 22 purpose-designed bicycle "cabanas" (lockers). Steps lead up to the next level, which will contain organic wastecomposting facilities for the complex, while the top-tier will be given over to Ireland's first "Living Machine" sewage treatment plant - an urban version of the reed-bed system.

GREY water - what's discharged from baths, showers and washing machines - will also be recycled and the building will have a rainwater harvesting system to conserve scarce resources. The grass-covered roofs and verdant hanging gardens are intended to create habitats, mask noise and counter the urban "heat-island" effect.

Those who buy the apartments - and they won't be cheap - will not have to live like green hermits, however, as the building will be wired for information technology and all the other accoutrements of modern living. And because of its orientation, they will also enjoy good daylight in what the architects describe as a "sensorial oasis".

The Daintree Building attempts to show how good architecture and green design can work. "What we're really trying to say is that ecology is not about going backwards to living in the Stone Age. It's about how we're going to think our way out of the problems we face," according to Brian O'Brien, who would "love to live there".

"We think it's the kind of `good design' the Bacon reports urged last year as a way of allowing higher densities in urban areas", he says. And though constrained by a tight backland site, it will be close to public transport and all the amenities of the city centre.

Scheduled completion in mid-2002 is critically dependent on how well the apartments will sell. Agent Keane Mahony Smith is launching them from plans next Monday, April 9th, at 6.30 p.m. in Daintree's existing premises on the site at 62 Pleasants Place, when the architects and engineers will be on hand to answer the greenest of questions.