"When Hugh gave us a ten, we all screamed!" - Mayo couple on RTÉ's Home of the Year

It is an exciting April in the Diamond-Scahill household in Aughagower. 

On Tuesday night, Erica and her husband Liam were joined by family members to watch their home feature on RTÉ One’s hit show, Home of The Year. 

The Westport family of six will soon welcome a new member as Erica is 38 weeks pregnant and is due to give birth within the next two weeks. 

She laughs that “"if last night didn't put me into labour, nothing will.”

Absolute honour

Speaking to The Mayo News the day after the show aired, she said that to see Hugh Wallace tell “the nation that he thought our house was 10 out of 10 was an absolute honour.”

"Hugh Wallace said he was giving us a 10 and that he adored the house, and we all just screamed," she recalls. "I couldn't believe we got a 10 from him. It was just such an honour. Myself and Liam have watched the show from the first series. We love the Great House Revival. We're big fans."

The moment carried an extra layer of emotion for viewers and the family alike. "We were absolutely devastated when Hugh passed away so suddenly in December," Erica says quietly.

Another nice moment was when fellow judge Siobhan Lam took a shine to the bespoke walk-in wardrobe.

“I was absolutely delighted when Siobhan said she would take our walk-in wardrobe and our ensuite, pick it up and drop it in her home, there's no bigger compliment either.”

The shaker-style kitchen

“Overall, all of the comments from the judges were mainly positive. We knew Amanda wouldn't be thrilled with our shaker-style kitchen. She's renowned for those comments, and I knew there wasn't enough neon or pops of colour for Siobhan, but we stayed true to ourselves. Our home is ours. It is our taste, our style, our lifestyle, and we built it around our family and our needs, and we stayed true to that, and I hope that that came across,” Erica said. 

The phone, she says, has barely stopped since the show aired. "We just got bombarded with people who told us they were so proud of us and that our home was an absolute credit to us. For people to say they felt we should have gotten through — the phone has been busy, I have to say."

Not making the final, she insists, was always something they were prepared to accept with good grace. "We designed our home for our family, for our kids. We certainly didn't adjust anything to impress any of the judges. It is what it is. It looks exactly the same today as it did on filming day."

“Our home is minimal and classic contemporary, we focused on natural light. We focused on airy spaces. We gave character to small snippets in the home. We definitely have some contrast.”

“Siobhan said she would have loved to see a bit more contrast, but they didn't show too much. We have a fully dark green bathroom. We have a black bathroom. We have a navy utility. Our favourite spot is colour drenched in green, so it's definitely not a fully whitewashed home.”

Erica knew that their home wasn't kind of pushing too much on the judges’ taste and that’s part of the game and you have to take it on the chin and accept their points. 

The couple got over it very fast. The fact they had to keep it secret that they were on the show before it aired helped them to put it to the back of their mind and process it.

Finding a new favourite spot. 

They have watched every season of the show and were first approached by the show’s producers to enter their home three years ago. 

Having turned down the approach for the two years previously, they felt ready this year and Erica jokes that “it was a great way to get my husband to finish a few jobs around the place.”

Fast forward to last October and the film crew arrived at their house for a two day shoot. 

While a wet day at that time of year is normally unremarkable, it forced the couple to pick a different favourite spot in their home. 

Erica and Liam had originally chosen their courtyard as their favourite spot. 

However, the bad weather meant that they had to choose an internal favourite spot instead.

Recalling the change, Erica says that she and Liam looked at each other and said, ‘You know what? We love to go in there, and we had decorated there about 12 months previously, and it was our kind of chill-out zone.’

Their house, as you can imagine, is extremely busy, so in the evening when everybody's asleep, and the silence commences, she says that “it's lovely to just go in this cosy, tranquil atmosphere that you just get relaxed immediately when you sit in there. So we really enjoy that space for ourselves.”

The courtyard

The sheltered courtyard is at the back of the H-shaped floor plan — a design decision that transformed the home. "Not only did it penetrate natural light throughout our home, it also gave us a very secluded inside-outside living area that we use anytime it's dry," Erica says. "I was out there this morning having my breakfast."

The courtyard, with its raised planters, water feature and views across to the children's play area, functions as an additional room for a significant chunk of the year. "It gives us an extra room in our home that we can use for maybe 40% of the year," she says. "And because we created the raised planters within the courtyard, that also gives us a view of lush greenery and florals throughout our home, which I adore."

The courtyard at the back of the home

The couple planned the layout with family life at its centre. The living suite sits on one side of the courtyard, the sleeping wing on the other. "The kids can all be in bed, safely tucked up, and we can host a dinner party in our courtyard or in our dining room and kitchen, and we're far enough away that we don't disturb the children — which is just such a win-win when you're a relatively young couple who still likes to socialise."

Two day shoot

The logistics of the filming day were more regimented than many viewers might imagine. The crew arrived at 7am, spending two hours filming the family and conducting interviews before the judges arrived at around 9:15am. At that point, Erica, Liam and the children had to vacate entirely.

"The judges actually were filming there until 6:30 in the evening, and then we were allowed to enter our home again," she says. The following day the house had to be available for Steadicam filming of interior angles — another full day away from home. "We never got to meet the judges. They were there when we were gone, and they had left before we returned."

When the call came, about a month after filming, to say they hadn't made the final, the mind naturally went to dark places. "You start to catastrophise it and think, 'Oh my god, did we get any zeros? Did they absolutely hate the place?'" She laughs. "Your mind runs away with you."

The 'Marmite window' 

 What neither she nor husband Liam had expected was quite how warmly the judges would respond to some of the home's more unconventional design choices.

Perhaps the home's most talked-about feature is what Erica affectionately calls their "Marmite window" — a large internal window cut through the hallway wall into the dining room. 

"When we were building, the amount of friends and family that were telling us we were making a huge mistake putting this window in the middle of our home," she remembers. "They kept saying, 'Why wouldn't you make it a door?' And we kept saying to them: when it's done, you will see the results."

The 'marmite' window

The reasoning was practical as much as aesthetic. An archway would have created an unwanted thoroughfare through the dining room. Instead, the window draws light from both ends of the house throughout the day. "The sun rises to the back of the house, so it floods through from the back in the morning. Then it sets at the front, and it floods the dining room and kitchen space through that window all evening."

It has also delivered an unexpected bonus for Erica in her day-to-day life. "Where it's situated — when I'm at the island, which, let's be realistic, as a stay-at-home mum, is about 70% of my day — I have a view from the island straight through our dining room and into the door of our playroom. When the girls are in there playing, I can actually see that they're safe and happy from the kitchen."

The judges loved it. "Hugh adored it, and Amanda, who's very hard to please, was very impressed with that also," Erica says with satisfaction. "We have a couple of family and friends that we want to say 'told you so' to."

Dream bungalow

The house itself is the product of circumstance as much as creativity. Erica had always dreamed of a two-storey period home with sash windows, but the hilltop site they purchased had other ideas.

"My husband told me that dream is dead — you're not going to get planning for a two-storey," she laughs. "We'll have to build a bungalow. So we took out a pen and paper, and we drew out our dream bungalow."

Her biggest fear was ending up with something dark and cramped. "I was so worried that we'd end up with those 70s bungalows that are really long and really narrow and really dark. All we wanted was to fill the house with light and natural light."

There was no interior designer involved. No architect. Erica and Liam drew the plans themselves, brought in a local engineer, Gavin Joyce to scale them up and handle planning permission, and did much of the work themselves over three years.

"Liam project managed the whole entire thing. He dug out the foundations, he did all the landscaping, and from the inside out, he did a lot of work," Erica says. "There was blood, sweat and tears, definitely."

During lockdown, Liam turned idle days into something lasting. "Every day he went out and spent eight or nine hours building our stone walls that now are sitting in our gardens. It was just a great use of his time when he was going to be idle, and in such an uneasy time, it definitely kept him occupied."

The couple make a great team as Erica explains that "Liam loves the hands-on part, and I love the creativity. So we're a good balance together." They have now been living in the finished home for four years this coming June.

Erica is a familiar face in Ireland's online world, boasting an impressive Instagram presence that sees around 2 million interactions every single month. She's built her platform into a go-to destination for interiors, lifestyle, home content, and more recently, pregnancy and partners with a wide range of Irish brands, both local and nationwide, to help get their names out there.

And while Erica might be planning to take things a little easier for a couple of weeks, the internet, as she knows better than most, waits for no one! If anything, her engagement has risen since the show, with her followers flooding her page with well-wishes and interactions ticking up even beyond her already stellar monthly numbers.