Ireland's favourite architect was busy travelling around America last year checking out New York mansions and LA super homes. We caught up with Dermot to find out if any of these U.S. trends will make their way to our shores. Watch the video above.
"I think we are embracing a little bit more of the open plan kind of family living space.
"I think for a long time in Ireland we built houses with very preconceived notions of what a house should be; you needed a good dining room for Christmas day, you needed somewhere to put the Christmas tree at Christmas and it's usually a bay window at the front of the house.
"What happened was people were using about 20% of their houses and then we had all of these rooms around the house that we never ever used so I think people are slowly realising, look...
"I think the recession did it - lack of money, lack of space, we had to be a bit more imaginative. Instead of having an office that you might go into for two hours a week, it became a desk in the corner [...] or it just became the dining table.
"People are far more efficient with how they use their homes now and they're being a lot clever with design and I'm hoping it's some, little, tiny bit to do with the likes of Room to Improve, Home of the Year and all of those."
On tonight's episode...
Dermot heads to Killester in North Dublin to complete a distinctively edgy transformation of a 1950s semi-D for clients Cliona and Micheal.
Website designer Cliona and IT manager Micheal have already spent €30,000 renovating a 1950s semi-D but as new parents, the two are in desperate need of a complete and properly functioning family home.
They want Dermot to complete the job they started, replacing an extension and a motley collection of sheds in a small triangular back garden, with usable family space.
Builder John insists on trying to keep to his eight-week build schedule but the build runs into problems – demolition uncovers the presence of asbestos and there’s the unwelcome arrival of a €20,000 bill for extra costs, which leads to a temporary shutdown of work on site.
Meanwhile, Dermot struggles to reconcile Cliona’s edgy interior design aesthetic with his own vision of how the house should look.
Watch Room to Improve, Episode 5 of 7, RTÉ One, Sunday, March 18th at 9.30pm
