Dermot Bannon’s plan leaves Cork clients hot and bothered
His programme tomorrow night features Dave and Susie Horan from Fermoy, Co Cork.
The presenter revealed he resorted to unusual means to get his way.
“Susie loved colour and she loved everything mad, anything she hadn’t seen before she’d say ‘I’ll have that’ — it was a little bit of, kind of, keeping reigns on her,” he told Ian Dempsey on Today FM.
Susie also wanted a hot tub, and it was while they were both testing one out that Bannon made his pitch.
“I had a very strong idea of this really stark kitchen for the house, so what happened was I showed it to her in the hot tub.
“But we were filming in it for about an hour-and-a-half because they had to do loads of cutaways.
“It got so hot in there she just turned around and said: ‘Dermot I don’t care anymore, just build the thing’, and I thought that’s it, any tough decisions I need to get past people, bring them to the hot tub, film it, and they’ll all roll over at the end.”
The dream build sounds heavenly... Now, let’s just hope the project goes swimmingly!#RoomToImprove continues this Sunday at 9.30pm on @RTEOne. pic.twitter.com/2P4fxxpuGm
— COCO Content (@COCOcontentie) February 23, 2018
Bannon said the show’s featured home this weekend, was one of his favourite projects, as the building — with swimming pool and sauna — was a ‘playful house’ in the centre of the town.
“What really interested me about this story is that once you go over a certain budget in the country, everybody wants to live on seven acres and 10 miles from the town, and they didn’t.
“They wanted to stay in the town where they had their friends, where they could walk to the park,” he said.
“All of her friends said ‘Are you not mad, would you not move?’ so they had this kind of soul searching, staying in the town and doing a big project in the town when most people who do a big project in the country, go miles out.
“But they said ‘we’re going to spend our whole weekend in the car’, so I really admire them.
“There’s a lot of soul- searching with them, and I hope that this is a sea change and what people start to do is they think there are really cool advantages to living in a town,” Bannon said.
The building register shows the work undertaken at the house includes the demolition of a single-storey side porch and construction of a 270 q m two-storey, side extension including a new kitchen/dining room, gym, swim spa, sauna, steam room, changing room on the ground floor, and a den, office and two bedrooms and bathroom on the first floor.
