Daintree Paper – A Short History.

Like so many other businesses, Daintree paper started off in a kitchen.  It was 1995 and I wanted to get out of a leather business that had no future and to get into something that was good for the environment, so I started making paper out of old waste office paper and magazines. 

The kitchen was a total mess; I was pulping the paper with our food processor and forming the sheets in the baby bath. I cut up old woollen blankets (from the local charity shop) for felts and hung the sheets out on the line in the garden to dry. Our next-door neighbour thought we were using the blankets as nappies for the baby!

I have to thank my very tolerant wife for putting up with all this. I replaced her food processor and a paper business was born.

The first lot of paper was pretty terrible, but I thought it was lovely and started to get more interested in fine quality papers. On a holiday to Stockholm that summer I visited three specialist paper shops and I was hooked.

I began to sell art papers from home and within a year I moved into our first shop up a stairs and down a lane on Pleasants Place.

I have to thank all our customers who managed to find us as the shop was very well hidden.
Within a few years of opening we were printing and making beautiful wedding stationery from the beautiful fine art papers we were selling to artists.

Year after year we became more a stationery shop and less of an artist’s supply shop, so when we opened our new shop on Camden Street in 2004 the only large sheets in it were for wrapping paper.

In 2005 we stopped printing stationery and selling large sheets for artists, so we could concentrate on supplying materials for you to make your own invitations.

In 2006 we opened our shop on Morningside Road in Edinburgh.

I would like to thank all our artist customers that we had since we started, they were very demanding and gave us the high quality standards I hope we still have today. The knowledge of paper we had to acquire was mainly due to their exacting standards

There are so many people who worked for and helped Daintree paper develop. I would like to try and mention them all. Truly, without them and their creativity and enthusiasm, there would be no shop today. So in a loosely historical order (and I hope I haven’t left anyone out), a big huge thank you to: Helen, Lucy (I’ll never forget working with her), Rowena (her neither, she now has her own business- ’The Wedding Press’), Miriam, Eoin, Uli, Deborah, Eva, Oran, Beverly, Sarah, Ivora, Michelle, Anne-Marie (paper maker with a fantastic laugh) Helena, Marie, Anne-Lise, Christine, Ciara, Stephen (who painted our steel doors), Maria, Gerard, Seamus, Sarah, Fiona, Mairead, Barbara (who now works for Equinox and designed this site) ,Jenny , Jan , Mary , Anne ,Emma , Stephen ( who now manages our shop in Edinburgh) Rachel, Serena, Sandi (our bookbinder, who also has her own business), Daniele (from Rome and a Roma supporter) Simone (from Rome, but a Lazio supporter!) Jacqui (who wandered off on an elephant and just might come back), Martha and Helen.

And of course all the people working here at the moment – Eoin (who looks after the site)
Alison W who took all the photos for the site) Luke (who looks after all the stock and our till system), John (who cuts the paper), and Stephen and Hillary who manage your orders, answer your queries and despatch everything from our beautiful shop in Edinburgh.

Environmental Awareness

At Daintree Paper we pay attention both to who makes our papers , how they get to us and the impact we all make on the environment.

Paper like Lokta, grown in the foothills of the Himalayas, from bark – a renewable resource – helps prevent soil erosion, thus reduces the incidence of flooding in sensitive areas like the Bay of Bengal. It also allows members of those rural areas to stay there, stemming the rate of urbanisation and keeping small communities afloat.

Our Indian Cotton paper is also handmade and is made from recycled cotton waste from clothing factories. This paper is sourced directly from small businesses and helps maintain the traditional artisan crafts of making paper.

Our Mulberry papers, like Thai Silk, are harvested from a renewable crop and like the others, keep traditional skills alive and encourage countryside jobs.

We’ve personally visited these factories and can vouch that the conditions are safe and ethical. We have developed close contacts over many years and continue to nurture them, visiting our suppliers every couple of years. All our paper is shipped, not flown, to help minimise our carbon footprint.

All of us either cycle or use public transport to go to work.
We try and use recycled packaging wherever possible. 

Our support office in Dublin is housed in a fabulous eco-friendly building that you can find out more about below. We love it and it’s a great place to work.

It wasn’t always thus; it took ten years of cold winters to get here – we really appreciate it.

Paul Barnes
Daintree Paper


The Daintree Building - Dublin, Ireland 

Background

The Daintree Building is one of a kind. Inspired by the delightful, fertile abundance of trees, or the rainforest in Australia after which it is named,Daintree meets some of its own energy, material, food and water needs and is a small step towards a more restorative, sustainable and healthful built environment.

Daintree Paper commissioned the project in 1999. We wanted an ‘oasis in the city’- a beautiful place to work and live in- that would smell of baking and fresh coffee. Now complete, the project was awarded the Building Design Award in the 2005 Sustainable Energy Awards and has been exhibited in The Royal Institute of Architects 2006 Awards.

As well as the fabulous Cake Café, Daintree has 7 privately owned apartments, office space for Solearth Ecological Architecture (the building’s designers) and our shop, warehouse and offices.




Ecology and Architecture

The project fuses contemporary architecture with advanced ecological design (emulating nature) to create perhaps the highest performance, low-impact apartments and offices in Ireland, while also being an example of healthy and delightful living.

The building runs as much as possible on Nature’s spontaneous or ambient energy, tying itself into the material cycles and energy flows of the site, as well as sunlight, wind, and underground warmth. It draws its heat from the ground using heat pumps (3 boreholes of 150m depth each) and from the sun through (15 square meters of) solar thermal panels integrated into the building’s design.

It sources its materials as much as possible from nature’s abundance; the basement and ground floor construction is of a type of concrete, which contains recycled blast furnace slag (GGBS) reducing CO2 emissions significantly. Above this its superstructure rises up three levels in timber frame, clad in Irish cedar and lime render. The environmental impact of all materials was a prime consideration. They were chosen to be natural, reused, recycled or recyclable.

Internal materials and finishes were chosen to be healthy (benign and breathable): natural paints; sheep’s wool, and wood fibre / cellulose insulations, recycled timber floors finished in natural waxes and oils. Walls are super insulated with the natural insulations, while careful use of membranes allows vapour diffuse through them. The healthiness of the interiors is increased by use of (recovered) wood, and high levels of day lighting achieved though use of direct, filtered, reflected and borrowed, light.

Daintree collects rainwater from its terraces and courtyards for use in the garden and toilets. The courtyard and green gantry facilitate food growing and composting (turning food waste to soil-the opposite of growing food!). Daintree’s facilities provides for easy recycling of ‘waste’.

The design facilitates bicycle use and it is located close to public transport to discourage car use.

The structure beside the café is called the ‘green gantry’. The bamboo here, and elsewhere, is salvaged from the Nissan Art Project (on the old Carlton Cinema in O Connell St, in Dublin ) of 2001. It’s roof is host to climbing plants and soon, perhaps, to food crops. In time the bamboo ‘tripods’ will be covered in clematis and alpine strawberry, to become a summer ‘green screen’, full we hope of butterfly and songbird and providing nature’s own aromatherapy treatment. In 2007 it will receive an artistic ‘treatment’ (using salvaged materials) by the artist Bette Melo.

Daintree’s extensive green roofs are made with an Alpine succulent plant called sedum, which changes colour from winter to summer. They act as attenuators- keeping much of the rainwater that falls on them off the streets (to help avoid urban flooding)-and also absorb urban dust and unwanted heat. The roofs, together with the green gantry, help absorb C02 and provide habitat for birds and insects in the city.

Future Proofing
The Daintree Building has been designed to comply with the Ireland's  highest environmental standards and has been recognised by Sustainable Energy Ireland as reaching the Best Energy Practise rating in its House of Tomorrow programme. It represents a significant additional investment, over conventional residential developments in Dublin and received a grant from SEI. No expense was spared to ensure that it runs itself in keeping with the environment without inconveniencing the resident.

Under the upcoming Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, it would be expected to reach an AA rating. For the technically minded its Heat Energy Rating is calculated to be 28kWh/msqYr (taking account of the high levels of insulation, careful glazing and the efficiency of the heating systems). The walls have a heat loss rating (U value) of 0.19W/msqK.

Space and water heating are expected to be a fraction (40% maximum) of conventional developments.

The Daintree Building is an example of proven innovation. Each ecological feature has been tried and tested before in other countries or here in Ireland. All innovative systems are backed up by conventional technologies or duplicate systems.

So if you are ever visiting Dublin don't forget to take in our beautiful building on your site seeing tour.

The Design and Building Team
Daintree was designed by Solearth Ecological Architecture (with Adrian Joyce Architects).
Engineering was by Buro Happold. Gardiner and Theobald were quantity surveyors. The contractor was Cunnane and Donaghey. Construction commenced in August 2004 and was practically completed in November 2005.