Jamie Durie building sustainable hinterland home in record time

CELEBRITY gardener Jamie Durie and a crack team of local tradies are racing against the clock to build a 3D-printed home on his property at Nashua in the Byron Bay hinterland.

Durie bought the 30-hectare former dairy farm in 2023 and demolished the old farmhouse to make way for the luxurious concrete house, which is one of three sustainable homes being built for the Nine TV series Future House.

“We plan to do the reveals around the 19th of December and we go to the air on the 23rd – it’s that tight,” Durie said. “We’re building this in real time. How often do you see a luxury, off-grid house built in a month?”

Durie has fond memories of family holidays at Suffolk Park as a child, surfing at Lennox Head, Tallows Beach and The Pass, and has long dreamed of moving to the area with his fiancée, Ameka Jane.

His children Beau, 4, and two-year-old Nash, who they named after Nashua, love the farm, which is home to geese, chickens, Black Angus cattle, sheep, owls, raptors, guinea fowl and platypus.

“At the moment it’s a weekender because we still live in a house in Avalon in Sydney that we built,” Durie said.

“We use this as our country escape, but at some time in the future we’ll definitely move here permanently.”

Durie said he’s been working with some of Byron’s best craftsmen on the build, including Knipe Concreting, Mat Waters Formwork, Pat Luck Electrical, East Coast Steel Fixing and DBN Plumbing.

“The response has been amazing and the way the building community here in Byron has supported us is something we will be forever grateful for,” he said.

“They have worked for around 21 days straight to get this thing finished.”

The 600sqm house has four bedrooms and a rooftop garden and is being built with a cutting-edge dual-glazed window system and non-combustible materials that are storm, wind and flood-proof. It also features a Renew solar system capable of generating 150kW of energy a day.

“Most houses use 16-17kW a day,” Durie said.

The other houses featured in the series include a HiTech Modular Home and another built using an innovative construction system called Resi Cast, with each build judged by the Green Building Council of Australia.

With Australia needing 1.2 million new homes in five years but suffering a shortage of tradespeople, Durie said the country needs to learn how to build houses faster and more efficiently.

“The team here has proven that you can build a house in a month,” he said.

“The bottleneck really is the DA process, but Byron Shire Council has been excellent to work with. They approved ours in record time.”

Jamie Durie’s Future House airs on Tuesdays at 8.30pm and can also be streamed on 9Now.