After 15 years of advocating for open-plan livingrooms and cheerily bunging kitchen extensions on to the back of rural cottages, Room To Improve’s Dermot Bannon has become part of the wallpaper of Irish television.
Paradoxically, wallpaper is the last thing you are likely to encounter on RTÉ's the home-makeover juggernaut. Bannon is one of those trendy architects who’d take a stripped-back industrial finish over old-school decor any day. I imagine he has a recurring nightmare in which he is chased by a pebble-dash 1970s bungalow or is forcibly relocated to a modern commuter suburb (sheer hell for all hip urbanistas).
Bannon’s decade-plus championing of chic aesthetics becomes a flash point as the latest series begins with an agreeably tense trip to Charlestown, Co Mayo (RTÉ One, Sunday, 9.30pm). It is here, out west, that we find marketing executive Karen Mulligan, who is dead against the host’s plan to put exposed joists in the ceiling of a derelict family property on the town’s Main Street.
“It won’t be my style – I can’t visualise it,” she says – as if Bannon had suggested painting the exterior Barbie pink or installing a waterslide in the livingroom.
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Bannon refuses to take “no, not under any circumstances” for an answer and flies Mulligan to London to show her a swanky house where the exposed ceiling joists gleam like artisanal whalebone. She makes polite noises, but back in Mayo, isn’t for turning, and Bannon – amiable until he isn’t – is at his wit’s end.
“It’s giving rhythm and texture to the ceiling,” he exclaims – baffled as to why anyone would wish for anything else. A ceiling without rhythm? How do these people live?
It’s exactly the drama you want from Room To Improve. Down the years, the series has always been at its best when Bannon’s fancy pants design philosophy runs headlong into the client’s vision for their home as somewhere lovable and liveable. The show is first and foremost a celebration of Irish snoopiness. How we love to twitch the curtains and see what others are getting up to (and then immediately judge them).
But Bannon also wants the show to “tell a story” about modern Ireland. On the agenda this week is the supposed scourge of derelict buildings around the country and the challenge of repopulating our dwindling town centres. The dereliction debate can be fraught and ties into the broader issue of Ireland’s obsession with preserving old buildings regardless of any historical merit – rather than just knocking them down and putting something more useful in their place.
Still, whatever your feelings about the wider subject of dereliction, Mulligan’s tale yanks at the heartstrings. The Charlestown property was once the family butchers and has been shuttered and rotting away ever since her father closed the business in 2017 following a cancer diagnosis.
But now it is remade in style. Just not Bannon’s style. There is not a joist in sight as the hard work pays off and the gorgeously restored house is finally unveiled. Still, Bannon does work a bit of architectural magic. The kitchen is on the first floor, while Mulligan’s office space – she’s back in Ireland after 14 years in London – is bang out front overlooking Main Street, where the old shop premises used to stand.
“There’s no point living in the centre of the town if you can’t be nosy,” says Bannon. He’s joking. But the episode makes the more serious point that town centres should be thriving communities. Not for the first time, Room To Improve turns an everyday makeover project into an engaging story and tells it with passion and empathy.
