Hugh Wallace, who has died aged 68, was the affable uncle of Irish property television. Seemingly blessed with infinite quantities of good humour and optimism, this most unassuming of celebrity architects was someone viewers were happy to welcome into their livingroom, starting with Home of the Year in 2015.
On that show and in later series such as The Great House Revival and My Bungalow Bliss, he was an endearing, chummy presence who wore his decades of expertise lightly. What a pleasure it was to watch him open the door to a new house and wax rhapsodically about the animal print wallpaper or the huge moose head mounted in the downstairs toilet. In Wallace’s universe, there was no such thing as bad design: the perfect home, in his estimation, was a reflection of the personality of the people who lived there.
He was at once larger than life – his oversized spectacles and colourful shirts saw to that – and understated, even a bit bashful. Those qualities made him a natural on television, and it is surprising to consider that he had been a regular on our airwaves for a mere decade, when it feels like we all grew up with him. Yet his apparently boundless geniality did not tell the entire picture. He was a bon vivant with demons and was always honest about his experience of alcoholism – a diagnosis he did not finally receive until he was aged 55, after a heated row with his husband, Martin, led him to seek medical help.
Wallace was frank, too, about the depression he experienced on and off throughout his life. The darkest moment, he said, was during the financial crisis in 2009, when the collapse in the building sector left his architectural practice facing ruin.
“One of my darkest days was in Heathrow, returning to Dublin, having just closed the office in London and watching the business disappear at home. I broke down in the airport that day. I was in such a black place,” he previously told the RTÉ Guide. “I was a basket case for six months or so. I took to the bottle, didn’t get up in the morning, and all the rest.”
Wallace turned his life around both professionally and personally. While upfront he admitted that being well off meant he could afford the rehab and therapy that he needed, he made the most of what he described as his “second chance” and, with Home of the Year, became a low-key national treasure. Adapted from a successful Danish format, the secret to this cult fixture was that it was not about houses but the people who lived in them.
Yes, there was always that vicarious delight in seeing Wallace and his co-presenters – most recently Amanda Bone and interior designer Sara Cosgrove – snooping around someone’s statement townhouse or futuristic barn. There was fun, too, in watching the “bigger-is-better” Wallace politely disagree with the minimalist Bone. “Amanda wants to sit in a white room with a red chair,” he once said. “Whereas I want a complicated room full of memorabilia.”
But the joy of Home of the Year ultimately had to do with Wallace’s limitless enthusiasm – the way he smacked his lips as he proclaimed a room “yummy” or “delicious”. He could have been unleashed in a grim student bedsit from the 1990s and would still have something encouraging to say.
He was also arguably unusual among architects of his profile in Ireland in not being snobbish. Though raised in a well-heeled family in south Dublin, he loathed elitism. When conservationists criticised him for his extensive renovations of older buildings on the Great House Revival, his answer was that these buildings were freezing and that people needed somewhere to live. He also adored the 1970s bungalows sprinkled higgledy-piggledy across rural Ireland – having no truck with the snoots who regarded the “Bungalow Bliss” designs popularised by Jack Fitzsimons as an aesthetic abomination. The real abomination, as he saw it, would be to leave people with nowhere to hang their hat each night.
“Townies drive around the countryside and go ‘oh my gawd, those bungalows are ruining my view’,” he said, shortly before the broadcast of My Bungalow Bliss, his Valentine to Fitzsimons’s distinctly rural Irish aesthetic from 2022. “I think they are amazing. I think they served such an amazing purpose when they were originally conceived by Jack.”
Wallace grew up in Dundrum in what he described as a “Protestant bubble” – he says he met Catholics for the first time when he was studying architecture at Bolton Street College. His father was an alcoholic who successfully overcame the condition – only for tragedy to strike shortly afterwards, as Wallace would tell the RTÉ Guide:
“When my dad, Ken, stopped drinking, the whole atmosphere changed, our lives changed. That was an amazing period of my life, but then my mum (Susan) died early in her life, and I felt so sad for my parents, that at the point where they had got it all together, Mum died,” he said.
“My dad never got over that. I found it very difficult to cope as well. My Mum was so supportive of Dad, an intelligent woman who never got recognised as such, but women usually didn’t in those days. I never really got to know my Dad until after he stopped drinking. I was 17 then, and alas, at that point I discovered drink myself and started on my journey.”
Wallace also had dyslexia – a poorly understood condition in 1960s Ireland. “I was just assumed to be ‘thick’. It was a period where I had no confidence in myself to do anything,” he revealed to the Journal just last month. “When I was diagnosed as dyslexic, it was such a relief that I decided that I wasn’t going to rely on anyone else. I left college in 1980, and there was no work in Ireland. Out of 17 people who graduated my year, three stayed in Ireland. But we made our way and were lucky that we became very successful.”
By that point, Wallace knew he was gay – and dearly wished it were otherwise. “I didn’t want to be gay,” he said. “Particularly at that time in Ireland. Sure, I didn’t know anyone gay. That’s the truth… because everyone was in the closet, with the door locked. And then they would jump out every so often.”
A summer in New York, dancing in Studio 54, showed him that he could have a happy life as a gay man. He would meet the love of his life, Martin, on the stairs of The George – a nexus of queer culture in Dublin – and they were together for 35 years.
Wallace will leave a huge gulf in the airwaves. He brought personality and vivacity to the formulaic genre of property TV, his innate gregariousness coming across effortlessly on the screen. He had his share of struggles, but put him in a house with an interesting wall hanging, set the cameras rolling and he radiated sheer joy.