The full story of BOD, Amy and an unseemly row with the neighbours
They should be sharing a beer and a BBQ...instead BoD and his neighbour are at war over planning
‘It’s an old house, it needs a lot of love’ ‘Each metre proposed curtails light’
BY rights they should be the best of neighbours. They are two Northside men who’ve crossed the Liffey for love, both high-achieving professionals who, having done well out of their chosen careers, now want to be able to enjoy the fruits of all their hard work. And yet instead of sharing a beer as they are sparking up the barbecue, Brian O’Driscoll and Donal Fitzmaurice are — not to put too fine a point on it — at war. But it’s not a business venture or even a rugby match the pair have locked horns on. No, the cause of their ire is, in fact, a house.
And it now seems impossible that the two will ever get the chance to share memories of their northside childhoods, not now that the row over O’Driscoll’s plans for his house, which is attached to the Fitzmaurice home, has continued to escalate.
It is, by anyone’s standards, a magnificent house — an imposing Victorian redbrick, three storeys high, with a large bay window that overlooks the sweeping, tree-lined avenue on which it sits.
A corner property, it boasts large gardens to the front, side and rear. In this part of town, the most expensive suburb in the country, that amount of outdoor space is pure luxury.
Of course, it badly needs some TLC. The brickwork is noticeably shabby, the roof looks old and a talented landscape gardener would need some time to get things ship-shape. But the potential for the building is truly extraordinary.
It’s a home fit for one of Ireland’s most glittering couples. Or at least it would be if they were allowed to get on with the renovations they have planned for it.
Instead, a dispute with their immediate neighbours continues to rumble and hold up any works even starting on their new home.
With an appeal against their planning permission being lodged earlier this year, it seems that January is the very earliest when they will find out whether or not they can go ahead with renovating the house of their dreams.
It’s a sorry state of affairs, and not a terribly promising start to the lives they probably envisaged for themselves and their two young children, Sadie and Billy, at the Rathmines property.
It is also highly unlikely that they are happy to be the subject of such intense gossip by the chattering classes of south Dublin.
It started out so well for O’Driscoll and Huberman. They got their Palmerstown dream property for the relatively knock-down price of €1.8million. The previous owners paid €4.3million for the place just over a decade ago.
It does, however, need work before it’s fit for a family to move into. For the last number of years it has been separated into three flats, but has had planning permission to revert to a single dwelling for some time.
But O’Driscoll and Huberman don’t just want to pull a few walls down and slap on some paint. They’re going big.
Their submission to Dublin City Council details how they want to demolish an existing, small two-storey extension and replace it with a larger three-storey build. This will contain a new kitchen area, an additional bedroom and a study. There would be a new single-storey side and rear extension, and they plan to upgrade the facade of the house and remove the PVC windows.
The Fitzmaurices were not happy with the proposals and were swift to lodge their objections. Last June they complained that the scale of the build was ‘overbearing’ and claimed it would ‘be hugely detrimental to the amenity’ of their home.
Director of Coda Architects, Brian O’Donnell, lodged the objection on their behalf, which also took issue with the claim by the O’Driscoll/ Huberman architects that the Fitzmaurices were consulted throughout the design stages ‘and are satisfied that appropriate measures have been taken to ensure that the proposal will not result in the dis-amenity to their property’.
‘We would like to correct this statement. While some consultation did take place,’ O’Donnell’s submission read, ‘the applicants in the end, declined to amend their scheme to accommodate the concerns of my clients in relation to the extent of the proposed development.’
A month later, however, full planning permission was granted by Dublin City Council, who said the proposed extension was ‘well-reasoned’ and ‘an appropriate development’.
The Fitzmaurices lodged an appeal against the approval and this time they were more specific about their objections. They claimed their property is particularly vulnerable to excessive development on the O’Driscoll/Huberman site.
‘Each metre that the proposed development is higher or longer, immediately curtails the light and amenity of the east-facing open space,’ their appeal stated. ‘We consider the plan will add considerably to the over-shadowing of the rear garden — from mid-morning to early afternoon, prime hours for daylight and sunlight.
‘We submit that the height, deputy and scale of the proposed rear extensions... is a contravention of the city development plan,’ it went on.
An Bord Pleanála has postponed its decision on the renovation until 2018 — and neither party wished to comment on the dispute when contacted by the Irish Daily Mail.
A decision is unlikely to be made until mid-January, making it a full year since the couple and their planning advisers attended a pre-planning consultation meeting with Dublin City Council planners to discuss the application. At that time the return of the building to family use was welcomed by the council.
If An Bord Pleanála decide the renovation will go ahead, it will compound the last 12 months as being a particularly dismal year for the Fitzmaurices.
Last March, Fitzmaurice’s company Brandtone, a once hotly-tipped mobile marketing group that raised over €40million from investors, went into liquidation. It had been desperately seeking extra funding since going into examinership on January 31 following a dispute with a debtor over a €1.7million payment.
Founded in 2009, it employed about 130 people, including 70 in Dublin, and had operations in 14 countries, all emerging markets from Kenya and Nigeria to Russia and Brazil.
It ran marketing campaigns for big brands, including Unilever and PepsiCo, where consumers who handed over personal data were rewarded with phone credit top-ups and other bonuses.
Co-founded by Padraig McBride, a former executive at mobile group Digicel, it won an EY entrepreneur of the Year award in 2015.
Fitzmaurice must be still smarting, if not devastated, about the collapse of his once successful company, which was up until last year, in talks to be acquired by the global group Accenture.
Although he’s had some bumps along the way, his career, much like his new neighbour’s, has largely been impressive.
One of three children, Fitzmaurice was raised in a comfortable estate of four-bedroomed semidetached houses and went to St Paul’s College in Raheny. His dad Vincent was a businessman who worked for the agency that would become Enterprise Ireland. His mum Eithne was a musician.
After school he went to University College Dublin (UCD) where he got a degree and PhD in chemistry. After that he won a place as a post-doctoral fellow at Berkeley University in California. Like O’Driscoll, although obviously not to the same level, he played rugby in his youth. He is now a big fan of yoga. After years in the US and a year in Switzerland, he returned to Ireland to head a UCD research group and to lecture.
He was awarded the Institute of Chemistry’s Boyle Higgins gold medal for outstanding contribution to the advancement of chemistry in 2005, but left UCD for a career in tech venture capitalism.
At one stage he became executive chairman of a Dutch company developing solar-powered mobile phones. While with them he got an order for 300,000 handsets from Digicel, the Caribbean mobile operator owned by Denis O’Brien.
After meeting Padraig McBride, a former chief financial officer of Digicel, in 2009 they launched Brandtone the following year.
Along the way he married Isabel Kenny, who has worked in marketing and film-producing. The pair tied the knot at The University Church on St Stephen’s Green in 2001.
He has three children, Chris, 22, Hugo, 15, and 13-year-old Aimee. Their first home was in Ranelagh, but they moved to their Victorian semidetached house on Palmerstown Road more than a decade ago.
And it would seem this is not the first time they’ve been concerned about what goes on next door. In 2010 they submitted an ‘observation’ to Dublin City Council about their then neighbour’s planning application.
While they approved of them reverting the property from three flats into one dwelling, they requested the council make sure the works, were ‘carried out in a manner so as to be compatible with the works completed in recent years’ to their own home.
They also raised concerns they could not find a record of the firm hired by their neighbours as being ‘accredited conservation architects’, and objected to a proposal to subdivide the back garden and build a separate dwelling on it.
It’s believed O’Driscoll and Huberman looked at many properties on the road before settling on this one. Virtually a shell, it must have seemed the perfect place to turn into their dream home.
But as most home-owners can attest to, projects such as these rarely go smoothly.
And no matter what way the decision goes in January, O’Driscoll is unlikely to be inviting his new neighbour over any time soon.
Fitzmaurice’s company went into liquidation