Home of the Year episode 7: have we just seen the winner of next week’s final?

The winner this week was a small brick terraced house in Dublin, containing Eugene and his adult son Alex. An absolutely beautiful home, which has been extended (sensitively extended, as they tend to say on Home of the Year). It had a dual-aspect living room and a great timber screen between the kitchen and living areas. Sara was impressed: “I really found that the kitchen was a tour de force.” She has never said ‘tour de force’ before, as far as I know.

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The front garden had been opened up — but in a good way — and imaginatively planted. The reason for this was that, according to the press release, Eugene wanted a place to recharge an electric car. On the preview version of the programme I saw, there was no mention of this clever plan, and the judges just marched up to the front door, oohing and aahing as usual.

Also, according to the press release, Eugene – who used to work as a pilot – wanted a sustainable and well-insulated home. But, again on the version I saw, there was no reference to this either, nor of the solar panels mentioned in the press release. It was only when the camera looked out the tour de force kitchen window into the small backyard — or terrace, as we call it on Home of the Year — that I thought I saw a heat pump. “Isn’t that a heat pump?” I said to no one in particular. Hugh was standing in front of it, perhaps to obscure it.

We’re all in favour of pared-back programmes that just give you the facts and don’t faff around. Home of the Year is admirably economical; its tours of three homes are conducted at breakneck speed. And we must acknowledge that the Irish public, as a whole, does not like to be reminded of the climate crisis or of our dizzying energy bills. But surely one of the reasons for this is that conservation sounds complicated and expensive. We’re also convinced that we’re all living in houses too old and too awkward to take on all this newfangled energy-saving technology.

So it would be nice for us all, as we shiver round our fires and our radiators, to see how Eugene managed it. Yet not a whisper about it. A brief mention from Alex about how, whenever you come into the house, it is always warm: always warm, what the hell does that feel like? And a brief mention from Eugene about his state-of-the-art ventilation system, which means the air is always fresh. But, otherwise, not dicky bird. It really is peculiar. And I think Eugene and Alex’s house could win the final next week.

Meanwhile, here in Week Seven, it could be that the judges have been slightly renovated. Sara looks amazing — she might have had a haircut. And Amanda is wearing her hair both up and also in an asymmetric ponytail, which takes some doing. These style moves were apparent at home one, an old cottage in Co Wicklow with an absolutely enormous extension. Elaine is an interior decorator and Kevin is an architect — should they even be allowed to compete on the programme with those sort of qualifications?

There have been other couples with similar backgrounds and one cannot help feeling that a day of reckoning is coming, when Home of the Year will have a professional v amateur controversy similar to the rumblings about the professional status of Layton Williams on this year’s Strictly. This absolutely enormous home was full of pretty details — and there was a lot of pink — but Amanda didn’t like the “lack of continuity” between the old cottage and the new extension.

Then on to a ‘self-build’, this one 20 years old and in a field in Co Louth. Olivia said: “I don’t think Amanda is going to be keen on all the stuff everywhere.” And so it proved. Olivia had even wallpapered the washing machine (it looked much better), and she and her husband Peter won the hearts of the nation by having a large portrait of Clint Eastwood — I’m sure it was him — hanging in their hall.

Amanda should bear in mind that you need all the soft furnishings and colour you can get your hands on when you’re looking out on the Irish landscape in the rain. Although Olivia loved looking at it because it was a view over her late father’s land.

So things are much the same this week as they were last week and for the five weeks before that. Eugene and Alex’s house won and Hugh remains the only adult male on television who can say “Come on, girls,” and get away with it.