Dermot Bannon
Donal O’Donoghue meets Ireland’s most famous architect to find out what makes him tick
I always aim for the stars and fall somewhere way below that. I’m someone who will always chance his arm, give it a go
“Of course you sent Daniel a Christmas card,” I say to Dermot Bannon when we meet. It’s a joke. Daniel O’Donnell and the Room to Improve architect famously clashed on what was the highest rated show of last season. It turns out that in fact, Dermot did send season’s greetings to Daniel and Majella. “How did you know?” he asks, all serious, as my attempt at humour misses. “I’d count Daniel and Majella as friends now.” He insists that the show’s success changed nothing for him. “You get a lot of people blowing smoke up your ass, telling you that you’re a visionary and all that,” he says. “I’m not. I’m an architect, I do my job. Similarly I don’t believe the downside. So I haven’t changed how I think about myself or how I think about the show.” Before we meet, Dermot calls to let me know he’s running late. A contract needs to be signed somewhere so he has to zip from the west side to the north side and then back to Dublin city centre. He is always on the go, with his fulltime job (Dermot Bannon Architects), his broadcasting commitments and his family life. Plus right now he and his wife, Louise, and their three children are between homes, having sold their house in Drumcondra and bought a larger place nearby, which is in the throes of a major refurbishment. “We’re on week three on site,” he says of the work which is being lmed for a stand-alone TV show. “I’ve been crossing o days which I shouldn’t be doing. It’s a bit like being in prison. My wife and the family will not be involved in the documentary. It’s just me. Nobody will watch it.” I doubt that.
It seems like everyone wants a piece of Dermot Bannon. For this reason, I’d chosen a quiet corner of a discreet Dublin hotel in mid-a ernoon. When Dermot arrives clutching his notepad (he’s always scribbling notes) a couple greet him in a familiar way, as if the broadcaster is an old friend: a er 11 seasons of Room to Improve he probably is. Sometime later the owner of the hotel pops by to ask if we need anything and would Dermot mind awfully if he could stop by reception a er the interview as he has a few design queries. “Get in line” says the couple, who may or may not be joking. Before we nish, a woman, up from the country for the weekend with a bunch of friends to celebrate a signi cant birthday, arrives at the table. “Can I borrow Dermot for a minute?” she asks and he’s gone, taking a sel e with a half dozen cooing fans.
Ireland’s most famous architect is better known than ever, the celebrity face of a TV advert, a marquee name for TV shows. e latest, Dermot Bannon’s Incredible Homes, follows last year’s Dermot Bannon’s New York and LA Homes. Once again it’s a noseabout some of the planet’s most eye-popping residences, this time in Sydney, Melbourne, Sweden and London, with the irrepressible Dubliner as your guide. It was his rst visit to Australia and, yes, he loved it. Not just the country and the amazing architecture but the epic ight itself – it meant he could immerse himself in movies, as he so rarely gets time to watch at home. He nominates his favourite house from the new series, perhaps ever, as the cathedral-like Indigo Slam. “Have you seen the Sydney programme? You must watch it!” Bannon burns with curiosity. He calls it “a hunger”, curiosity too mild a word to nail his passion for the places people call home. “When I saw those amazing buildings in Australia it was like I was on a drug, thinking ‘Wow! Look at how they did this!’” He is, in the nicest possible way, a bit cracked. “Do you really think I’m a bit crazy?” It’s a habit of his, I notice, to frame questions that way: do you really think the show is suchand-such or do you really think he is like this or that. “Am I crazy?” he asks again. “You tell me? You know I think that it’s not craziness, just an incredible naivety. I always aim for the stars and fall somewhere way below that. I’m someone who will always chance his arm, give it a go. If you gave me a 747 I would try to y it. But I won’t make the same mistake twice.”
Lean, angular and irrepressibly perky, Bannon looks, and certainly acts, younger than his 46 years. e father of three – Sarah (14), James (10) and Tom (6) – loves to swim in the sea and went for a dip on Christmas and New Year’s Day. “Jumping o rocks with my three kids, we all adored it,” he says. On a family holiday to Florida last year, he also discovered rollercoasters and became obsessed with riding them. Occasionally, people mistake him for Ryan Tubridy (Tubridy too has been mistaken for Bannon). “Just yesterday I was walking down the road and there was a group of kids across the way saying, ‘See I told you, it is Ryan Tubridy!’ ere is a likeness isn’t there?” You nod at this charming man, resolutely young at heart but nobody’s fool.
e eldest of three (he has a younger brother, Pádraig and sister, Fionnuala), Dermot Bannon grew up in Malahide, on the northside of Dublin by the sea. His father, James (Jim) was a horticulturalist, his mother, Mary, a home economics teacher (Dermot still loves to cook in his “chill out” time). When he was seven, the family moved lock, stock and barrel to Cairo and lived there for two years. Even now, years later the smells, sights and sounds are still with him. “Life happened on the street,” he says of the Egyptian metropolis. He still loves street life and is not a fan of high-rise Dublin. Unsurprisingly he loved Lego as a kid and his early dream was to be an airline pilot or an architect.
He was a shy kid, bullied at school. “But everyone struggles at school, don’t they?” he counters. Yet I also remember him saying how he was a constant talker in those early days, which got him into trouble in class. But he was ever an adventurer, someone who at the age of 13 travelled solo to the far- ung reaches of Wexford to visit a relative. When he failed to secure the necessary points to study architecture in Ireland, he enrolled at Hull University. I tell him that this description of himself as shy and retiring doesn’t quite gel with the cocky 21-year-old contestant on Blind Date who won a date with Jenni Falconer. “Do you think I looked con dent? I was dying inside that night. And I’m still like that. I still get very nervous on live TV.”
His father never got to see him on Room to Improve, as he died some weeks before the
I realised how short life was, how you have to grab it before it goes