Dee Coleman is the new face and designer on Home Rescue: The Big Fix as the series returns for its latest run on RTÉ on Thursday nights. But who is she? What's she like? John Byrne reports.
The hugely popular 'sort out your gaff' show returns to our screens for a brand new season, but this time with a brand new designer on board, Dee Coleman.
Dee teams up with the familiar builder Peter Finn to jointly lead the Home Rescue team as they set out to transform six ordinary, disorderly homes. They’ve a total of five hectic days to declutter, redesign and rescue the heart of family life. What is she letting herself in for?
Regular viewers know the deal with this show: a heart-warming mix of human stories and home makeover – a deluge of decluttering, a ton of teamwork and parked van loads of positivity – changing people's lives for the better by redesigning their homes, replacing chaos with order and rediscovering the things that really matter.
This year, the Home Rescue team brings the Big Fix to homes around the country. Opening a new chapter for three generations of one family in an old cottage in Tullamore; bringing light to the dark inaccessible kitchen of a mother and son in Dunboyne.
They’ll also be transforming three very different bedrooms for a family in Kilcullen, and - in the team’s biggest challenge to date – rescuing a Clondalkin family of nine from a house piled high with their belongings.
Right. So we know what’s in store for the team. But we know precious little about about Dee Coleman. Where is she from? What’s she done up until now? Does she come from a long line of interior types? All these questions and more were bouncing around in my head before we had a chat.
First impressions? Lovely lady. Very friendly. And an absolute chatterbox who oozes positivity with an unwavering can-do spirit. Viewers are going to love her. Here she is . . .
Dee Early Doors
"I grew up in a fairly normal house in Castleknock, county Dublin. Neither parents were designers but my dad was always an artist, as a hobby, and my mum - every time we moved house - would knock down a wall. She’d pass it for months saying, 'This wall has to go.’
"We probably had the first ensuite in county Dublin, as my dad - I think it was in the late 1970s - took a wardrobe out and turned the area into a shower. When nobody had anything like that! And we didn’t even have notions! It was just one of things that he decided to do. And he did it.
"So I guess I grew up understanding and believing that we have, and should have, the power to manipulate our homes and to make them serve us. And from a very young age that was in the forefront of my mind. I didn’t play with dolls, I was always making stuff."
London and ‘Loadsamoney!’
"Then there was the Eighties, there was 60% graduate unemployment, so you had to do a sensible degree. I did a Bachelor of Commerce in order to get a job. Went and did a Masters after that and then straight off to London, and wound up becoming a management consultant. Very different!
"Loads of money, but it just didn’t do it for me. I wasn’t happy in my job. Having said that, some of my best pals are still from that time in my life. High pressure, long hours.
"I loved it in London. I’d no intention of coming home. But one day I was sitting in a meeting and there were fellas chatting about electronic data interchange between warehouses, and they were salivating they were so excited.
"And I was thinking, ‘This is sooo dull!’ I just couldn’t feign interest in this for the next 40 years. I need to do something else. I can remember the seating, I remember everything about that day, and I just decided, ‘Right. I’m going to retrain. And I think I’d like to do design.’"
The Swedest Thing
"So I found a course in London and I applied for it. First of all I had to speak to my husband - he was only new then - but I fully expected him to say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ But he said, ‘You’d be really good at that. Do it.’ And so I had to!
"He’s Swedish, and I find they have a more relaxed attitude to careers. They just have, I guess, from generations of always having wealth and security, they don’t tend to be chasing the buck. They’re more relaxed about that kind of thing.
"I did a course in KLC in Chelsea harbour, and found myself graduating from there and in a Notting Hill studio. Then, a year later, I set up on my own and that’s it.
Dublin on the Double
"Then I got pregnant with twins and wanted to come home to Ireland and my mammy! More than anything, it was the education system. The cost of it. You either had to become a devout catholic and sign in at mass every week, and that would have been a massive hypocrisy on my part.
"Or else you would’ve had to pay insane fees, which would’ve meant going back to being management consultant to afford them . . . I just thought, ‘I haven’t thought this through. I need to go home.’
"So I dragged my Swedish husband back to Dublin and we bought a house in Malahide in 2013. We bought the house with a view to doing it up. I always buy the most knackered house on the street because I don’t like paying for other peoples’ design, if you know what I mean?
"So we bought a house with single glazing and no insulation, with a plan of doing it up in a few years. Nine years later, we’re only doing it now!"
Building Brand New Dee
"I went and got a lecturing job because my kids were very young. And I didn’t have any professional network here. I’d left when I was 21 and there was no no social media or mobile phones then. So I literally had to start from scratch professionally.
"But I got a job in the Dublin Institute of Design teaching interior architecture. That was where I started building my professional network, where I met my now ‘work wife’ Jenny Coughlan and we set up a partnership called Collab Design Studio. Jenny’s the marketing one!
"I’m a member of the Interiors Association, which is the professional body for interior designers in Ireland, and they sent out an email, which came from Coco Content, who make Home Rescue, looking for a designer. The questions were very interesting . . .
"Before I knew it I was doing a screen test, and then I was selected. So, it’s been one of those weird, unexpected, happenings."
Home Rescue: The Big Fix, Thursdays on RTÉ2 at 9.30pm.
