Doing up my own home is a headwreck!
Dermot Bannon loved working on Incredible Homes in Australia because...
Very few people see me lose my temper. When I go, I go. I let it all go and then I’m grand
TOMORROW evening Ireland’s favourite architect returns to our screens with his new series Dermot Bannon’s Incredible Homes. But before we get to the €8million James Bond-style lair, the staircase designed for a horse to climb or the ten-people bed Bannon had a roly-poly across Down Under, he is more preoccupied with his own more modest refurb in Drumcondra, Dublin.
‘It’s going grand, that’s the only word I can use,’ he says, with a deep sigh, and progress is being filmed for a stand-alone RTÉ show. ‘It was a very simple three-bed house and we’re turning it into a four-bed house. It’s going to be finished in July.’
Fans of Room to Improve will not be surprised to learn that his plans are for the entire ground floor and some of the first floor to be open-plan, with all rooms leading into each other.
‘There’s no use advocating all of these things in clients’ houses and then doing something different for myself. So, it has a mezzanine in it, it has an atrium, it has a glass box. It has all the things I push other people to get into their house,’ he says, quipping that his ‘credibility would be gone out the window’ if he didn’t practise what he preaches. The floor-to-ceiling window with sliding doors, he probably means.
Bannon and his wife Louise, who looks after the finance side of the business, are believed to have spent some €800,000 purchasing the fixer-upper – having sold the family’s more compact, turn-key home nearby for around €700,000. They are demolishing the garage and building on a two-storey side and rear extension. Estimates put the whole cost of the new home at some €1million.
‘It’s very stressful. It’s a lot more stressful than I thought it was going to be,’ the 45-year-old admits. ‘There are obviously stressful jobs on Room to Improve but you park them, you tend not to think about them once you go home after work. But my own house I’m thinking about morning, noon and night.
‘It’s a complete headwreck. My brain is melted. I’m literally counting down the days until it’s done – that’s what you latch on to. I have a pain in my stomach all the time. There’s worry there all the time and I can’t get rid of it.’
Does the stress of it all make him feel some empathy for the TV clients who were rude to him? ‘No,’ he laughs, admitting that he too has lost his temper a few times along the way.
‘When I lose it, I lose it. Very few people have ever seen me lose my temper because when I go, I go; I’d let rip. I’m pretty good at losing my temper. I’ll be getting my way on that day! No one wants to be near me because if anyone tries to calm me down they’ll just get a barrage too. The control freak is in me in all aspects. If I’m in a bad mood and I want to lose it, I want to lose it and I’ll be finished when I’m finished. I let it all go and then I’m grand.’
Another feature of his TV show is Bannon’s lofty plans going over budget and his no-nonsense quantity surveyor Lisa O’Brien – not to mention the ashen-faced clients – having to rein him in. Most memorably, Donegal crooner Daniel O’Donnell looked shell-shocked to hear his Kincasslagh fix-up would cost a minimum of €340,000.
‘That face still gives me a pain in my stomach,’ says Bannon, who is starting to know how Wee Daniel feels. ‘I suppose I become like one of the clients. Every time we go over budget I see can we claw it back somewhere else.
‘There’s a budget to do the house and there’s no more money there. So if something goes over budget something else has to come out: ‘That will have to go’ – that bit I’m not being great about. I’m digging my heels in.’
You have to wonder whether he will have any luxury features, like that pool and spa David and Susie from Fermoy had him design for their home last season, much to the begrudgery of Twitter users.
‘I wonder if I should even tell you this? Am I going to say this?’ he agonises, before capitulating. ‘There is going to be something maybe at the end of the garden if I have a budget. I love outdoor saunas and cold water, I tried them in Sweden,’ he says, where he went for the third episode of the new fourpart Incredible Homes series, which also visits Sydney, Melbourne and London.
‘If I can get the money together I’ll put in an outdoor sauna at the end of the garden,’ he says, of his 60m back yard. ‘I’ll have a barbecue down there and create an area where I’ll add a hot tub in a couple of years time. I’m an outdoors creature and that would be my ultimate dream: a simple woodburning sauna, nothing fancy, something rough-and-ready, down among the trees, and an ice-bucket for afterwards. I love the extremes of hot and cold.’
At the moment he, Louise and their three children Sarah, 14, Jack, 10 and Tom, 6, are renting close by. Family life and all of its challenges go on despite the upheaval and like most parents, screen use has been causing kerfuffles.
‘I suppose we struggle through like everyone else. We try to limit the time they’re on it. But sometimes when you’ve been out with them all day and you need to get something done – sort out a wash or put dinner on...’
While ‘all three would prefer to be out playing football if you gave them the choice’, Dermot was forced to take some drastic measures recently with James.
‘I banned the Xbox for a month and he gave up Fortnite because of it and he realised how addictive it was.’
That realisation couldn’t have come immediately, of course. Did James take it badly?
‘What do you think? It was cold turkey. I had the Xbox in the boot of the car for a month and I drove around with it. The amount of parents I told and who said, “Oh, yeah, we bring ours into work with us in the morning.” They’ve all done it. I reached a boiling point in the house where it just wasn’t worth it. After a month he got his Xbox back and he hasn’t played Fortnite since,’ he says of the highly addictive, playerversus-player battle game.
His teenage daughter is the only child in the house with a phone and while he doesn’t mind her using it for homework research or to Facetime friends, he worries about social media.
‘It’s a really difficult one. My daughter is very social, she’s out all the time, she meets up with her friends, she does her homework, she’s a gymnast, she plays football.
‘It’s the social media end of it that concerns me. I know how social media can make all of us anxious.
‘I suppose we have to make sure that they have a good sense of their own self-worth because I don’t think you’ll ever be able to get rid of it out of their lives,’ he muses. ‘All
we can do is give them the confidence and security to deal with the comments or whatever.’
Twitter tends to light up during episodes of Room to Improve with people sharing their unfiltered tuppenceworth for or against its presenter’s plans.
‘Being in the media a bit I’m lucky that the kids have seen the attention I get on social media and they have seen how I react. You can get some amazing comments and also some horrendous stuff. So you don’t believe the good or the bad – and they see that. A lot of the thing is likes and follows but hopefully my kids don’t chase fame.’
He then adds, remarkably: ‘They don’t see fame as a positive thing’.
Certainly their dad is a household name and recognised wherever he goes, which must impinge on their precious family time together. Especially if people are cheeky enough to ask Bannon for home improvement tips.
‘I’m always happy to talk to people and sometimes it happens,’ he concedes. ‘But that’s just a part of what Dad does. It must be the same if you’re the doctor in a local town – people will come up to you asking about their prescriptions. To say the kids don’t mind it would be lying. But I don’t mind.’
He admits to feeling ‘dad guilt’ about spending so much time working.
‘It’s just the pressures of life and work and maybe social media where you see dads out with their kids all the time,’ he says, proving how carefullycurated online lives can make anyone feel inadequate from time to time. ‘Maybe they’re not even out with their kids all the time, maybe they’re just taking photos and going home again,’ he quips. ‘I’d love to be around half the week. There’s always that guilt as a parent. I think it’s a difficult thing when you have a profession that you love and also have children who you love. My job always spills over into evening time. If I get a phone call from client at 8pm I always take it, though I probably shouldn’t.’ He set up Dermot Bannon Architects during the recession in 2008 and now employs a staff of ten. Watching him on Incredible Homes – marvelling at dream houses in exotic locations – you can’t help but think he has the life of Reilly.
‘We did the whole two episodes in two weeks and I never got a day off!’ he exclaims, of his Antipodean adventures.
But he had a surfing lesson on Bondi! ‘Actually that morning when they asked me to go surfing I said, “It’s 7am, no. I’m going to be useless, I’m not going to be able to stand up, it’s going to be rubbish.” But actually I could surf, and I could stand up – I was thrilled with myself. But after that was done they made me get changed at the side of the street and I had to go to the next house without even having had a shower, after wearing someone else’s wetsuit.’
After a lifetime restructuring people’s modest farmhouses and semids, Bannon is like Charlie Bucket in the chocolate factory visiting some of the world’s most expensive and imaginative homes.
There’s Villa Marittima in Melbourne where the architect Robin Williams’ opera singer partner Donald Cant takes a shine to Bannon, snapping pictures of him enjoying the pool.
The strange sloped design of the floor might not be to everyone’s taste but Bannon says it was ‘a bit like sitting on a sand dune and really comfortable’. VIEWERS might be astonished that the architect of Cliff House – which overlooks Sydney’s Gordon Bay – decided to hide the panoramic sea views with bricks on one floor.
‘I got it in the end,’ he says. ‘Too much glass would have overheated the building in the summer.’
When he suggested to the owner of Boneo Country House it would have been cheaper to do something slightly differently in her copperskinned extension, she shot back: ‘There’s nothing cheap.’
Meanwhile one of Australia’s richest women Judith Neilson’s modernist pile Indigo Slam – with its dining table set for 60 – may divide viewers’ opinions.
In London he visits two houses that ‘would be diamonds if they were jewellery’. He reckons one of them looks like a fidget spinner. As in Australia, weather plays an interesting role in house design in Sweden.
‘I couldn’t get over how harsh their climate is – cold, exposed, and dark by 2pm. They use candlelight, moodiness, reflection... When I was leaving Sweden I bought so many candles. I’m all about getting as much light in as possible but their approach is sort anti-Room to Improve and anti what I do. I learned a huge amount.’
But you’ll have to wait for that candlelit Nordic sauna in his own back garden. ÷Dermot Bannon’s Incredible Homes is on RTÉ One tomorrow at 9.30pm.