Beautiful houses in tune with birds’ needs

Raymond Kenny designs houses by day and in his spare time, makes an array of architecturally inspired birdhouses as well as feeders and nesting boxes. What began as a hobby ten years ago turned into a business as he learned how to make durable, environmentally-friendly bird homes, designed meet the needs of their occupants, as he tells  JUDY MURPHY.

When Raymond Kenny is designing a home or home extension for a client, he goes through the person’s wish-list item by item, regarding each item as a problem to be solved.

“It’s about listing all the difficulties at the start and then designing them out,” explains Raymond, who has practised as an architect for three decades.

He adopted the same approach eight years ago when he started making birdhouses based on traditional architectural designs.

Today, he produces colourful, environmentally-friendly birdhouses, tables and nesting boxes in an immaculately tidy workshop to the rear of his Craughwell home.

An orderly system makes for an efficient working environment, says Raymond, who is originally from Lawrencetown in East Galway and who worked on major development projects in London in the late 1980s before returning to Ireland in the 1990s with his wife Olive and son Cathal.

Raymond now combines his day job designing homes for humans with his other passion – making homes for garden birds.

He always loved crafts, he explains, and is equally enthusiastic about science, which made this hobby particularly appealing.

In 2010, during the last recession, when construction work ground to a halt and Raymond had time on his hands, he decided to make a wooden birdhouse for his own enjoyment. The result was lovely but left him with a question. Was it possible to make a bird table that could survive the Irish climate?

No matter what kind of timber you’d use, sooner or later the weather would destroy it, he explains.

“I was half-way through making that first one when I said ‘this will rot’,” he recalls with a laugh.

Raymond went online to research how timber birdhouses could be made waterproof. Despite extensive exploration, he couldn’t find the answer. He shifted focus and began an online search for weatherproof material that would be lightweight, environmentally friendly and affordable.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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