"I'm not on the air that much", Dermot Bannon tells me over the phone, a half-weary laugh in his voice. "I think most people feel like I'm on the air every week. I think it's just because I've been around for a long time."
That said, he still gets those pre-show nerves. When we speak, he's days away from the return of Dermot Bannon's Incredible Homes, which airs tonight. "It's just because you put your heart and your soul into something. And I'm not just presenting the show. Like, I've been involved in the production of it. I've been and I've chosen the homes with the producers. It's kind of like my baby. And you want it to go well."
The show also marked Bannon's first international flight in three years, after the Covid-19 pandemic put a halt to travel and thus, filming. "When you're kind of in year number two [of travel restrictions] and not travelling you kind of think, will I ever, ever leave this country again?" he recalls.
"I was like a kid heading off. Like, I had my suitcase packed two weeks in advance, I was that excited. Normally I'm shoving stuff into a bag on the way out the door. So it was nice to hear a foreign language, nice to eat different food and great to see the other buildings and just to have your world and horizons opens back up again."
This season sees Bannon jetting off to explore architecture and design in Spain and Scotland, visiting everything from a Gaudi-designed apartment to a house that converts into a rain-proof hideaway. As always, it's a chance to see Bannon in peak architecture-nerd form.
He fondly recalls visiting the Gaudi apartment in Casa Milà, owned by the Gaudi Trust and lived in by Tere Iglasias Rovira, who was born here 72 years ago. Rovira, who had limited English, greeted Bannon at the door in English, he remembers: "I said 'Si', and she said, 'oh, he does speak Spanish!' I said, no, that's the extent of my Spanish!"
His visit was punctuated with Rovira pulling him to certain spots and trying to explain an ingenious design feature, an experience Bannon is still clearly moved be. "I don't think there's any other Gaudi apartments left that are lived in by regular people", he says. "And when she dies, her family won't get the apartment, it'll go to the Gaudi Foundation and become either an office or museum."
They're not all Gaudi apartments however, and Bannon stresses they have builds of all kinds, including "a 60k house that is super cool and won every architectural award going", he says. Exploring properties in two vastly differing countries, both in culture and climate, led to plenty of revelations, he says.
"In Spain, every house that I went to seemed to have a really strong central idea and they stuck to their guns the whole way through." He mentions a build that "was on the side of a hill overlooking the sea and the natural thing would be to put a big terrace looking over the sea".
"But it was so windy and so exposed there that they kind of put this courtyard into the middle of the house. And then the courtyard was the idea of the house."
In Scotland, however, there was a certain familiarity to the location. "They kept describing this kind of climate to me when I was going through it. They said, it rains a lot, it's windy and it gets dark at 5 o'clock in winter. I'm thinking, yeah that sounds very like Ireland."
"They build their houses to cater for the rain, to cater for the grey days", he says, whereas, "we tend to kind of still build houses for the summer and hope that we'll get the sun in for long enough."
One home stood out to him: "He showed me that if you pull some leavers and pulleys and twist it, the whole house, all the walls closed in. There were sliders, there were shutters, everything closed in around it and he lit the stove and it just became this really warm, cosy space. It was like being in a snug in a pub in rural Ireland."
"They actually really embraced the kind of the cold and the wet and the damp and the misery. I learned far more from the trip to Scotland because the climate between Scotland and Ireland and just how they handle and they accept it. I kind of felt like, in Ireland, are we slightly in denial about the winter?"
With the cost-of-living crisis raging on, keeping our homes warm and comfortable has never felt so important. However, as Bannon says, "cosiness and warmth is a feeling". Invest in changes that will actually heat your home.
Get ready to see some amazing architecture 🏡🌈@DermotBannon is back on his travels for a new series of #IncredibleHomes ✈️🇪🇸
— RTÉ One (@RTEOne) October 14, 2022
Sunday 9.30pm | @rteplayer pic.twitter.com/oPrTroN8nl
"If anybody is starting into any kind of a renovation project or anything like that. invest as much as you possibly can in renovating and upgrading your installation and your BER rating", he says. "You can kind of talk about the colours of cushions, using dark paint and lighting the fire, but there's nothing actually making the house warm and cosy. If you go to Scandinavian homes, they're always painted white, they're bright. But even at minus 20 degrees outside, they're warm inside."
Making the most of your space is also vital, and something he's eager to learn from his next bucket list destination: Japan. "I'm fascinated by Japanese architecture. Not just the style of it and the simplicity, but it's everything. That their approach to materials and longevity, but it's also the flexibility of spaces.
"They don't have very big houses, they don't have very expensive houses, but they've got really beautifully crafted houses and really innovative. I think we have lots of rooms in the house in Ireland that are not used. They use every inch of space."
Watch Dermot Bannon's Incredible Homes on Sunday at 9:30pm on RTÉ One.
