Home of the Year finale: There’s no justice – but you can’t expect any logic from this programme

How wrong can you be? I was sure Eugene and Alex had nailed it and I think I speak for all of us when I say we would be happy to move into their home tomorrow. But what can I tell you? There’s no justice.

Instead, we found ourselves, for some reason that was never explained, at the Palmerstown estate in Co Kildare, where the final judging of Home of the Year 2024 took place – in the Deliberation Room, as Hugh called it. Because nothing says contemporary Irish home in the 21st century better than a Victorian pile.

Luckily, the seven finalists were all good-humoured and gracious in the echoing rooms (acoustic problems, Sara Cosgrove would have said) and saying what a privilege it was to be part of the competition, blah, blah, blah.

You had to go to the judges for a bit of bad temper: Sara, in a lot of eyeliner and looking fab. Hugh Wallace, in a Schiaparelli pink shirt, a pocket square and scarlet loafers, and Amanda Bone in an asymmetric sequinned number that reached right down to the floor on one side.

“You two are on something,” said Hugh as Amanda and Sara nominated the Derry rectory and the Waterford conversion as the first homes to be eliminated. Amanda never did like that rectory.

“You loved the wallpaper,” said Hugh, allegedly fighting a rearguard action.

“In one room,” said Amanda. Sara said of the Waterford home: “The main bedroom didn’t have a door on the bathroom.”

I do wonder about Sara and bathrooms. Way back on the first episode, she was upset when a married couple, Aoife and Tim, could see each other showering – in their en-suite bathroom, where they were visible to nobody else.

Now here were Craig and Matthew laughing and talking in the hollow reception rooms of Palmerstown House without a care in the world. They didn’t know they had just been busted by one of their bathrooms. That left us with five homes. The schoolhouse in west Cork was eliminated because the main bedroom wasn’t considered to be up to much – and in fairness it was not.

Sara said the schoolhouse’s windows “aren’t Home of the Year”, by which she must mean 11 feet high and hung on a sliding door to the patio. Your guess is as good as mine.

The bungalow conversion in Offaly went as well. This was tough because surely there are bungalows all over the country that could be converted, extended and transformed in just this way.

We’re going to take a moment here, during the commercial break, to talk about something that Home of the Year never mentions: money. The homes in the competition are totally finished and decorated to within an inch of their lives – the west Cork schoolhouse being the exception. But the turnaround on these homes is just amazing.

According to the press release, and to give just one example, the Derry rectory was bought in 2020. That’s what was presumably a full renovation and total redecoration – top to bottom of a four-storey house – in just three years. Home of the Year

was filmed last year. And there was Olivia socialising with the other competitors and looking great in a floral jumpsuit, not knowing her home had been dumped.

Then we were into part two, with three homes left: the gate lodge in Tyrone; Alex and Eugene’s mid-terrace brick home in Dublin; and something the judges persisted in calling “the boutique abode in Dublin city”.

The boutique abode was bought in 2022 by Shane and Marty and now it’s the winner of Home of the Year.

Amanda thought their dining room was just delightful – which it most certainly was. Shane and Marty wore strong but muted colours, just like the colours in their house, Marty in muted grey and Shane in muted green.

Sara let herself down by saying to Shane and Marty: “I’ve done a lot of hotels in my time and when I came upstairs and saw the little kitchenette I was just, ‘God love these guys’.”

Sara – you criticised Aoife and Tim (among others) for getting their ideas from hotels.

But it’s foolish to expect logic from Home of the Year. It’s compulsive television, though.

I give this 10th series a seven.

“When I came upstairs and saw the little kitchenette, I was just, ‘God love these guys’”