Dermot Bannon Donal O’donoghue talks to the TV architect about his major new series that begins this week
With his latest TV show, Dermot Bannon champions ingenious design and small spaces. But just how green is the country’s best-known architect and what are his dreams? Donal O’donoghue meets him
“Did I?” Dermot Bannon is curious to know if he received any social media feedback following his recent appearance on the Late Late Show when he offered his thoughts on the current housing crisis. Turns out that the most famous architect in the land, the person whose reality TV shows, most prominently Room to Improve, usually top the ratings, is no longer on Twitter. “For years I was so caught up with the show and the ratings and what people thought,” he says. But during lockdown I decided that I wasn’t going to worry any more about what people think. So for the first time ever, I didn’t look at Twitter after The Late Late Show. So I don’t know about the feedback and I don’t really care.”
Or maybe he does care. A teensy bit. An hour or so before we met, I was en route by electric train (aka The Dart) to the architect’s workplace in Clontarf. The deal was two-fold: a new TV show imminent and a cover star for our magazine on eco issues and sustainability. ‘How green is Dermot Bannon?’ I write (followed by lots of question marks) in my notepad. I list the facts. As a broadcaster, the Dubliner has jetted the world in search of incredible houses (Dermot Bannon’s Incredible Houses), he has been caricatured for his love of glass (the bigger the better) and his many builds for Room to Improve have been on an epic scale. So what is Dermot Bannon’s BER rating?
“How green am I?” repeats Dermot as we sit outside a café, amid comings and goings. “Well we were very green doing the new house, which is A-rated. And we’re good at recycling and re-using and in work there are very few houses we’ve done in recent times that haven’t had an A or a B rating. We got rid of gas and oil boilers and installed heat pumps, we made houses air-tight. As an architect, I believe you have a moral obligation to ensure a house’s energy efficiency rating is up to a certain standard. So for me, the environment is a massive issue and buildings are a huge part of that. I have a responsibility to inform and guide people to make their home as energy efficient as they can be.” Then there is Dermot Bannon’s Super Small Spaces (his name has been part of the title ever since Room to Improve), a new two-parter that does mostly what it says on the tin. The first episode is a winning one, largely due to the Mccarthy family, whose story is a focus in the hour-long show. Last year, after their father Paddy died by suicide, the four Mccarthy siblings raised over €32,000 for Pieta House and also decided to convert an old double-decker bus into a living-space. This project is chronicled on Super Small Spaces, where Dermot wisely lets the quartet speak for themselves, especially the effervescent Thomas, who does what very few have managed on umpteen episodes of Room to Improve: out-talk (and in one instance, out-fox) Dermot.
The idea for the show, cooked up during the pandemic, was to focus on clever homes. As such, it taps into the mantra that the best goods can come in small parcels. Episode one also features the homes of interior designers, Deirdre Whelan (a former judge on Home of the Year) and Sarah Lafferty, whose terraced home in Dublin epitomises what can be achieved through ingenuity and invention in small, clutter-free spaces. “Spend time, not money when thinking about designing,” is Lafferty’s advice, something that is to the fore in a show where we get a customdesigned POD, an old pub in Kilrush re-purposed into a two-bed holiday home, a gym-office combo in a back garden and a concept house built of wood and some leather.
The last time I met Dermot Bannon, in 2019, he was about to move into his own ‘dream’ home in Drumcondra with wife Louise and their children, Sarah (now 16), James (13) and Tom (9). He was up the walls with a snag list and oxter-deep in a special edition of Room to Improve chronicling the build. Between TV and real life, he was quite literally talking to himself. But the timing couldn’t have been better. The following March, you-know-what happened and for the past 15 months
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I’m a dreamer
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During lockdown I decided I wasn’t going to worry any more about what people think
or so, working mainly from home, family life has been good, even if Dermot admits he was rubbish at home-schooling. “I’ve put a kit sauna into one of the sheds,” he says. “Ninety five degrees and a cold shower afterward. It’s the best thing ever.”
Dermot is a talker. “Maybe that’s what I got from my father,” he says when I ask what traits he inherited. And rather than answer the question, he merrily chugs off into a myriad other tangents, the blessing of an ever restless brain. Today, for the first time in the many times we have met, he isn’t armed with his trusty notepad, the one in which he is forever doodling ideas, visuals and sometimes great notions “I’m a dreamer,” he says, which I find hard to believe. Didn’t he once, in his callow youth, get on a bus by himself and head off to his granny’s in Wexford? And didn’t he choose the path less travelled by enrolling at Hull University to study architecture? And didn’t he . .. well the list goes on.
He nods. All true. “But I’m always much better with someone else in charge of me,” he says. “Without certain people in my life, I’d be sitting in a chair somewhere dreaming.” Of course, it’s all about pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. “And I’ve always done that,” he adds. “Like when they asked if I’d like to present a TV show (Room to Improve) and I said yes and then thought ‘Whooah!’ (for the record, Dermot had previously co-hosted House Hunters, a TV gig he had applied for himself). That was out of my comfort zone. As is going on The Late Late Show and the rest. But you just have to jump in, that’s how things happen.” Is he a worrier? “Yes I can be a bit,” he says. “I think my worry comes from not being in control.”
Dermot, who grew up in Malahide in north Co Dublin, was a lover
of Lego from his childhood, frequently entering (and often winning) underage Lego-building competitions run by Arnotts. Last year in the Irish Times, he confessed that in one instance he lied about his age (he won that competition too). His mother, Mary, still going strong (she has had her second vaccination), was a Home Economics teacher while his late father, Jim, was a horticulturalist. Does Dermot have green fingers? “Well let’s say there are lots of weeds in the garden but I do like gardening.” he says. But it’s his love of design and buildings has shaped his life and his career as well as his home. A devotee since his college thesis days of the Swiss architect Luigi Snozzi and latterly, a big fan of Instagram. “I follow every famous architect. Norman Foster is there. He’s a god!”
His TV travels have also shaped his design ideas. “Two countries that really influenced me were Canada and Sweden,” he says. “They have very cold winters and yet when there I was never in a cold or damp house. They build smaller and they build better and the insulation is amazing. In this country, we have kind of got into the habit of lighting the fire and throwing on another couple of jumpers without actually thinking of the building fabric. I’m often shocked and upset when I see some of the older generation living in poorly insulated, damp houses and their counterparts in Copenhagen and Stockholm are in warm, well-ventilated and heated houses. Of course, it costs money to bring houses up to spec but there are grants available and you can do it incrementally.”
Space, as his new short TV series emphasises, is truly the final frontier. So we talk about the C word, clutter. “The amount of anxious people I’ve spoken with on Zoom calls, wringing their hands and saying ‘I can’t stand the clutter any more’, is ever increasing,” he says of how his clients’ expectations have changed in the past year or so, with the utility room a key space in many people’s design plans. And the housing crisis? “Housing is a fundamental right,” he says again, re-iterating his principal Late Late Show point. “We will all need it. We all need a safe place to live. Are we not entitled to that?’ Assuming it’s a rhetorical question, I mumble a reply. “But we are,” insists Dermot. Of course he’s right but we’re not going to solve it over a cuppa in Clontarf.
In the past year, he has taken up running, abandoned Twitter and goes sea-swimming all year round. Dry robe? “Oh yes, I’m a dry robe **** ,” he says with a laugh. So what’s next? Well, he hopes to do TV as long as it will have him and is pragmatic about that future. “The show will end when it ends.” He has been approached to write a book on architecture for children and there is something else. “I’d like to design and make vessels and objects for kitchens that don’t look rubbish,” he says. A dream maybe, but we know how they work out. And there are loads more ideas in that head, along with those hard-to-fully-erase Dermot worries. “By the way, what was the Twitter reaction to the Late Late?” he asks and we both laugh.
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Housing is a fundamental right. We all need a safe place to live