7 minute read
‘I love having it in the head, then seeing it being made’
Conor Faughnan sat down with Dermot Bannon, unquestionably the leading Irish voice in modern architectural design
This is an excerpt from an interview Conor Faughnan did with Dermot Bannon as part of the SeniorTimes podcast Series. To listen to the full interview, or to any of the now over 100 episodes of the SeniorTimes Podcast Series go to www.seniortimes.ie
Family life..
I grew up in Malahide in North County Dublin with a brother and sister, my Dad was from Dungarvan and he moved up to Dublin to work in the Teagasc Research Center as a horticulturist and I think he spent the first ten years waiting for a transfer back down to Dungarvan but never got it and my mom was from just outside New Ross from a little town called Campile. So my memories of holidays as kids was us being put in the car to go down to Wexford or Waterford while a lot of my friends parents worked for Aer Lingus so they got free flights to Florida or where ever while we got free mushrooms! Looking back now though I have very fond memories of my granny’s old farm house which is still there.
Dermot Bannon, Ciarán Ferrie and Michelle Moore, all Directors with AVA Housing with home owner Eileen
On where his love of architecture comes from..
I loved playing with Lego, I love drawing, painting, I loved making things. I love having something in the head, putting that on paper then seeing it being made and adjusting it, tweaking it because you'll see things when they become three dimensional and then the final results are very satisfying.
I suppose it's a drug and I actually like when things go wrong. Like, you know people who love Suduko and people who love crosswords, when something isn't quite working out and you need to solve it like a puzzle and you hold on a second and say what happens if we reduce the depth of that or pull that apart by 10 millimeters then lower it - I love that.
Early career
There were only 2 Colleges where you could study architecture in Ireland at that time, Bolton Street and UCD, so points were very high. So I got my degree in the UK and was practicing 10 years for a firm here on big projects like Blanchardstown Shopping Centre and then RTE did a programme called House Hunters which was like the Irish version of Location, Location, Location presented by Roisin Murphy and Liz O’Kane and when Roisin left to have her baby the RIAI advertised for a presenter. it was all finished I went oh, I'll never do that again. But RTE persuaded me to do another series and after 2 years of presenting and working part time I decided to set up my own practice and carry on with the programme – that was in October 2008, right at the start of the housing crash.
But in some ways I was lucky as people were stuck with negative equity and they couldn't move out of their homes so families were in homes that they thought were going to be starter homes, back then people bought themselves houses every 20 minutes. So in the early days I was doing small jobs around the country and had Room to Improve to pay the mortgage.
Room to Improve really came into its own when we were given an hour slot which enabled us to show the quantity surveying side of things for example and homeowners were much more invested in the project and once RTE saw the result we were given a Sunday night slot and that was the making of the programme – and now we are on series 14.
His involvement in AVA Housing - a new scheme that allows older people to stay in their homes
Because of what I do, every time I go into the radio people ask me about the housing crisis and the problem is , in Ireland we don't build a variety of houses here so if you go to Berlin or Denmark you'll get one bed apartments two bed apartments, three bed apartments or houses but they will all be built within spitting distance of each other. But, we, in Ireland build an ocean of one bed apartments or 3 bed semi’s.
Dermot with Conor Faughnan
I was on a radio show chatting about this and Michelle Moore contacted me and said I've been thinking about this for months as well and we had a coffee, then Ciarán Ferrie another architect, came on board. So it’s a project which I’ve been on from day one and we’ve now got government funding, we’ve done 2 pilot schemes which have done really well and we have been given funding to do 20 houses next year.
What we do us we take an average 3 bed semi and you've got somebody living there by themselves and they're thinking I I'd love to rent out a room. So the idea behind AVA housing is that we take grants that are available to people and you're taking an average 3 bed semi and you're splitting it into 2.
It's a really simple idea. So, the downstairs in an average 3 bed semi will have a kitchen, a good dining room in the back of the house and a good sitting room to the front. So it's three individual spaces, a living room/ sitting room, you get a kitchen and you get a bedroom, so you've got everything that you need for somebody living by themselves. Plus, you have your own back garden and your own front garden and the street that they have lived on for years. Then upstairs there is accommodation that you don't need which is the same floorplan- so you've got a bathroom in the back of the house and a room at the front of the house and the box room. You can knock through the box room to make an open plan kitchen, living, dining room. What this is trying to do is to provide a really simple solution that doesn't cost a fortune to convert because we leave as many existing walls as possible. You've now created accommodation upstairs for somebody in a residential area where there's good transport. So the home owner now has rental income from upstairs but you are also providing affordable housing through the Rent-A-Room tax relief.
So Beaumont/Artane is one of the areas we are looking at – there a lots of essential workers working there who can’t afford rent and the house type is perfect. For the homeowner, we project manage and co-ordinate areas such as planning and construction work and the rental. Who knows, the owner may get companionship from the arrangement. So we just want people to get in touch with us and see if this scheme could work for them.
What we also do with the bathroom downstairs is that we make it more accessible and a little bit bigger so that if somebody is in their 60's now and they are planning for what happens when they are 75 or 80 this works for when they may not be able to get around as easily as they used to. On Dublin buildings
People ask me this question all the time right and people don't like my answer when I tell them because they're always asking me to pin point a building that I love and I think that's really a New York thing.
I love Dublin because we don't have high rise, we have shoulder heights in Dublin of about 6 stories that means that every window in Dublin if you're on the street more or less you can talk to, it's very human scale.
I also love the fact that with six floors you get natural sunlight into every street. I've been on streets in New York they're completely overshadowed. People will hate me for this but I would love to see most of Dublin pedestrianised
