Renovating a property in some of Scotland’s more remote corners brings its own challenges. In March’s Scotsman Property Podcast, Kirsty McLuckie speaks to Banjo Beale, interior designer and television presenter, about his work on Mull, where resourcefulness is needed because you can’t just pop down to the local DIY megastore.
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00:00 [Music]
00:02 Hello and welcome to the Scotsman's Property Podcast.
00:05 I'm Kirsty McClucky and I write and edit the newspaper's Home section.
00:10 For this edition of the podcast, we have a special guest.
00:14 Banjo Beal came to prominence for most of us when his eclectic style won the TV competition Interior Design Masters in 2022.
00:24 He's since gone on to present tele-shows himself, including the BBC's Designing the Hebrides and of course, the really popular Scotland's Home of the Year.
00:33 Welcome Banjo.
00:35 Hi, thanks for having me.
00:37 You're very welcome. One thing I didn't say there is that in my intro is that you're Australian, whether people pick that up or not.
00:46 But do you still identify as an Aussie or are you a naturalised Scot now?
00:50 I think I'll always be an Aussie. I think there's lots of similarities between Scotland and Australia.
00:59 I suppose the weather is not one of them, but I'm quite a jovial bunch.
01:03 Happy go lucky. I'm quite relaxed in lots of ways.
01:08 So you found it easy to fit in?
01:10 Yeah, I fit in.
01:12 OK, well, I wanted to start by asking you about your sort of early life in Australia and that kind of first spark of interior design.
01:23 Was it was it something that you always wanted to do from from being a child or or is it something that you've fallen into along the way?
01:31 Well, I think looking back on it, it definitely was. Every Sunday I used to beg my mum to let her rearrange our living room and I'd spend all day changing the furniture around and trying to kind of add a little bit of a zhuzh to their boring kind of living room.
01:52 I grew up on a racetrack, a car racing track in the bush in Australia.
01:56 So it wasn't exactly an environment where an interior designer might kind of flourish.
02:03 So it wasn't really an option for me.
02:06 Can I just check? It was a racetrack. And were your family, did they have anything to do with the racetrack or was you just adjacent to a racetrack?
02:14 No, it just so happened we lived on the bottom of a car racing track and it's just in a small town.
02:20 It's very famous in Australia called Bathurst and they had lots of big noisy engines, a very famous 500 mile car race around a mountain.
02:31 And it was just a town full of rev heads and very masculine.
02:38 And here I was, instead of watching the cars zoom by, I'd be inside on a Sunday rearranging furniture.
02:46 But it was never really fostered or encouraged that I might be able to pursue a career in that.
02:54 So that just kind of fell by the wayside.
02:57 So did you have any sort of creative people in your family or was it, were you just an oddball?
03:03 I was a bit of an oddball. My mum always said I was born on the other side of the tracks and not in a bad way.
03:12 They absolutely like adore me and, you know, they're my number one fans.
03:16 But they were just, you know, really working class people, salt of the earth, that, you know, that weren't necessarily creative.
03:27 So I don't know where I got it from.
03:30 Were you interested in things like magazines or did you have television shows yourself that you watched growing up?
03:37 Yeah, I used to always get my mum to buy me garden and home magazines when I was a kid.
03:43 And I used to cut out lots of pictures and make mood boards as I was a kid.
03:48 And I'd always draw my dream farmhouse and all my animals that I'd have with it.
03:55 So I kind of was manifesting back then and it kind of came true.
04:00 But it took a while for me to jump on board the kind of design train.
04:05 Well, yeah, I was going to say that I believe it was rather a circuitous route to being sort of an interior designer and TV presenter in Britain.
04:14 Because didn't you start out with a perfectly good job in Australia in advertising?
04:21 Yeah, I was working in advertising. I kind of straight out of university.
04:25 I studied it and got a job in advertising and marketing and kind of spent a few years kind of working really hard, working my way up.
04:36 And I kind of probably thought that was it. I was quite happy in it.
04:41 It was fulfilling. It was creative. And I had the kind of hilarious job title of ideas director.
04:48 So my job was quite literally just to come up with ideas.
04:52 So I kind of thought I'd made it. But then I met my now husband and he was a bit of a free spirit.
05:01 He was working in a fruit and vegetable shop, travelled the world as a backpacker.
05:05 And I'd kind of barely even been on holidays. And we met.
05:10 And then two months later, we bought a one way ticket to Sri Lanka and started this world trip.
05:16 And I kind of still feel like I'm on it. That hasn't quite ended.
05:20 I see. So, yeah, you're still going round. And so you blame it all on him.
05:25 So where did you where did you get to on that world trip?
05:29 Well, we had no we had no fixed kind of destination.
05:35 We had our one way ticket to Sri Lanka and we spent about a year probably backpacking through Asia and India and went to Nepal.
05:44 And in in Nepal, we were in the 2015 earthquake or 16, was it?
05:53 And it was really quite confronting.
05:56 We have family and friends out there and they lost one of their sons.
06:00 So that kind of changed our perspective on everything.
06:04 So we spent a bit of time there helping rebuild. And we had a kind of they're a farming family.
06:12 They farm yaks. And so we it kind of knocked us for six, really.
06:18 And so we kind of after that decided we kind of wanted to settle down somewhere.
06:23 And we had the kind of in our mind that rite of passage that every Aussie does.
06:28 They get their visa and go and work in London in a pub.
06:32 And we got to London and we thought it was it was we actually thought it was too cold.
06:39 So we decided to live on the west coast of Scotland.
06:43 And my husband decided he wanted to be a cheese maker. It was the first I'd heard of it.
06:49 So we found this cheese farm on Mull and the rest is history, I guess.
06:55 So deciding to be was the cheese making anything to do with the yaks?
07:01 Well, yeah, I think so. So our friends out in Nepal had yaks and the Swiss had come out kind of about 50 years ago
07:10 and had kind of taught them how to make a really hard kind of Parmesan like cheese.
07:16 But Ro was convinced that he could learn how to make cheese and then go back and help,
07:21 help them make some more kind of commercial cheese to get them out of like a spot of bother and start selling to tourists in Nepal.
07:30 And then he thought they could sell to China. And he had these big grand plans.
07:34 And we got to the farm here on Mull and we told the matriarch here, Chris, all about our friends in Nepal.
07:42 And she said, we must do something about it. So we were here kind of a couple of days.
07:46 And then we started a curry night, raising money for them.
07:50 And then next thing you know, six months later, I'm kind of leading a pack of grannies
07:56 and local mullocks out to the Himalayas on a trek.
08:00 And Chris, the granny's teaching all of our yak farming family how to make feta and mozzarella and all these sorts of fun little cheeses.
08:11 So it certainly took a turn. I didn't quite see that on the cards,
08:16 but it started a really nice kind of relationship between Mull and Nepal.
08:21 And lots of people from Mull now sponsor the kids in the village to go to school.
08:26 And Chris has been out a few times and it's really helped to quite quickly connect us with the community here.
08:38 Because it's an incredible story. It's an incredible story that you and Ro decided that the best thing to do would be to teach these people how to make more cheese.
08:48 But you didn't know how to make cheese yourself. So you came back and Ro started working with a cheese maker on Mull to learn.
08:57 So it's an incredible story. It's an incredible story.
09:01 I was going to ask you, actually, your time in Nepal, or I suppose your travels generally,
09:07 do they still inspire your work in interior design?
09:12 Do you still think back to ideas, different ways of doing things that you've seen in different parts of the world?
09:19 Oh, definitely. I think, you know, when you're travelling, every little place has something that they just do really well,
09:25 whether it's, you know, Portugal and tiles or India and the colours that you see or the patina on a crumbling old kind of building in Rajasthan.
09:35 So it's endlessly inspiring for me. And I think back to my advertising days and an idea is nothing kind of,
09:43 it's more or less a combination of previously existing elements that had just never been put together before.
09:51 So when you travel, you have lots of references rattling around the back of your head.
09:56 And when you know when to pull on them, that's when you can kind of get really creative and create something, you know, beautiful or unique.
10:03 So I think travel is the number one thing that inspires me in all of my designs.
10:10 Yeah. Are you, when you came to Mull, did you realise that you were settling down, that that might be your home for a while?
10:20 Was that the plan or did you just come and think, we'll stay here and see how it goes?
10:25 Yeah, I think it just happened. We quickly fell in love with the people and the place.
10:31 We probably didn't think we'd last that long.
10:34 And what happened was Chris at the farm had a beautiful barn, the glass barn at Isle of Mull Cheese.
10:41 And she asked us whether we'd like to turn it into a cafe and farm shop.
10:45 So all of a sudden we went from being broke backpackers to cheesemakers to having a cafe and a farm shop on Mull.
10:54 So it all happened very quickly and we really loved it.
10:58 But that kind of taught Ro, my partner and I, a really important lesson that we should probably not work together as well.
11:08 It was a recipe for disaster.
11:10 And we also at that time, we thought we needed to thaw out a little bit.
11:15 So we actually left and we moved back to Australia.
11:19 We bought a house in Queensland, the hottest place in Australia, in the tropics and thought, OK, that's it.
11:27 We really needed to thaw out.
11:30 But, you know, a few months later, we quickly realised that we'd made a big mistake and Mull was actually home.
11:38 So we hot footed it back here and we haven't left.
11:43 Yeah, it's something about the West Coast. I also live on the West Coast.
11:46 I also live really rurally. I live on a peninsula, not an island.
11:50 And, you know, you go away from it.
11:53 My saying is a day out of Argyle is a day wasted.
11:57 And but you think about it when you're away. Well, you think about it when you're here.
12:01 And certainly, you know, in January and February and the grey drizzle and the freezing winds and stuff.
12:07 And then you go away and you start thinking, hmm, now it pulls you back. It really does.
12:13 When you when you were talking about the designing the cafe, was that the sort of first commercial interior design that you'd done?
12:23 Well, yeah, really, I think I mean, I was lucky enough to inherit like a beautiful space that Chris had made.
12:30 So I didn't really necessarily get to design it, but I got to kind of use that as my canvas to kind of bring in lots of old pieces.
12:39 And Chris is a really knacky woman. And, you know, everyone is that kind of really lives on the island.
12:46 I think you kind of add, especially on a farm, you have to use what you've got at hand and you don't throw anything out.
12:54 And you kind of just have to pull it together with what you've got.
12:57 So I really learned how to be resourceful there with Chris.
13:01 So we'd be making counters with old doors from the treasure shop in town and, you know, the co-op cash register counter would become like a shell.
13:12 And, you know, we would kind of use whatever we could get our hands on to make something really beautiful.
13:18 So it was definitely I think it was a quick lesson for me on how to be resourceful.
13:25 And it was really only that that kind of gave me the confidence then to apply for Interior Design Masters.
13:32 That is the secret to my success on the show.
13:36 I think I just was I really knew how to make a lot with a little and make it go a long way.
13:41 And I really put that down to living on an island and being resourceful.
13:46 Well, that's it, isn't it? I mean, you know, I mean, I'm in one of those postcodes as well that, you know, it says do not does not deliver to the highlands and islands, you know, that all sorts of all sorts of companies just will not.
14:00 And so you can't really buy new in a lot of cases.
14:03 But but also it very much fits in with the idea of sustainable design, doesn't it?
14:10 Reusing things that are possibly not meant for the purpose that you want them for, but just seeing things.
14:17 But it does take a bit of imagination, isn't it? You know, to look at something and think how it could be repurposed.
14:23 Yeah, I think that's the only thing I think that kind of the if you want to be creative, I think you probably need the imagination.
14:31 But you also have to create the time as well, because this kind of takes a little bit more time and often, you know, some builders and it's taken my builder a long time to come around to the idea of, you know, using old things, because usually they're wobbly and warped and full of nails and, you know, so you just have to, you know, decide that, you know, that's the way to do it.
14:54 And it's going to save you money in the long run.
14:57 Yeah, I'm going to come on to your book because you've written a whole book on this subject.
15:03 I'm going to come on to that in a minute, but I just to refer to it for a second because it made me laugh, actually, in the book you called Living on an Island Marie Kondo's worst nightmare.
15:13 And that really made me laugh. Marie Kondo, for those who don't know, is the decluttering queen, minimalist living and throw anything out that doesn't spark joy.
15:24 So what did you mean by Marie Kondo's worst nightmare?
15:27 I think we're quite the opposite.
15:29 I think we keep anything that might spark joy, you know, now or in 10 years time.
15:35 I think saving things for a rainy day, like, you know, you can't run down to the shops and you buy anything as easily as you can on the mainland.
15:46 So I think we just keep anything that we may need one day.
15:50 And that's absolutely the opposite of her philosophy.
15:55 But I think as well, like in that whole kind of decluttering kind of mindset, we forget that, you know, sometimes, you know, the old kind of, you know, cupboard that your granny had or, you know, our parents kept things in case they needed to fix something.
16:15 So that kind of whole make do and mend philosophy, when it's so easy and cheaper sometimes to go out and buy something new, you know, that's why we've created this kind of really quite damaging throwaway society.
16:29 So if we can fix it, I think that's the best thing we can do.
16:35 And if you don't have a shed full of items that you previously saved or handed down to you, where do you find them? Where do you source your materials?
16:47 Well, my favourite place is the salvage yard.
16:50 I think they're just absolutely the holy grail for me.
16:55 And oftentimes I'll go there not with a kind of preconceived idea of what I want, but I'll be inspired by the materials and then I'll kind of collect all of that stuff and then make something with that.
17:07 But I love salvage yards.
17:09 I go to lots of antique fairs down south.
17:12 Newick is one in particular.
17:15 And I mean, I'm a big fan of Facebook marketplace and it's amazing kind of what you can get for free on kind of community notice boards and stuff.
17:26 So there's lots of stuff kicking about if you dig a little bit.
17:31 Yeah, I sort of have a terrible problem of not being able to say no when on my local Facebook group or whatever, somebody puts an item up.
17:42 And I, you know, as you say, I can't imagine why I would need it, but I might need it.
17:47 I just sort of like, you know, my hand goes up and says, I'll have it, I'll have it, I'll have it.
17:51 And, you know, I've got all sorts of items in my garage, which, you know, a rowing machine, which I've never used, which I just couldn't let it go to the skip.
18:00 I thought someday, someday I might use it.
18:03 A tapestry kit, you know, a midge machine.
18:07 All of all of these things, you know.
18:09 But yeah, so there is there is that problem once you get started saying, yes, I could definitely do something.
18:16 You do need the time to be able to to renovate it and do it.
18:20 I meant to ask you, actually, in your book about sourcing materials, there's the chapters on antiques and repurposing things.
18:30 But there's also a chapter called mudlarking. What's that about?
18:33 Yeah, well, that's another one of my favourite things to do.
18:37 That's just I have a pal that mudlarks on the Thames and he goes up and down.
18:44 And, you know, it was interesting, like it was a really important trading route and, you know, was, you know, a tip for, you know, centuries.
18:53 So there's all sorts of fun treasures, not just bottles, but coins and like military things just along the riverbed if the tide's right.
19:02 But recently I also just went lock locking in the highlands.
19:09 So some pals of mine, they're on Instagram called Bottles from the Deep, and they dive for bottles and lots of fun pottery just in locks and rivers.
19:22 And a fun little tip I learned from them is we went to a kind of very old, like a Victorian fishing hut.
19:31 And usually when you're there, you just the fishermen would be there and they'd be having their beer or their whiskey.
19:38 And then you'd know where to look because the bottles would be throwing distance from the back into the water.
19:46 So we had lots of luck there finding some beautiful old bottles.
19:51 Absolutely. People behave exactly, exactly as they would today.
19:56 You can imagine competing to throw their bottles.
19:59 Exactly. Yeah.
20:00 I mentioned in my intro that you sort of came to prominence.
20:03 And I can't believe it was only less than a couple of years ago, two years ago, 2022, by winning Interior Design Masters.
20:13 And so this was after you had decorated, renovated, whatever, the cafe.
20:22 And what prompted you to decide to apply?
20:26 Well, no idea. I kind of did it on a whim.
20:29 I didn't tell anyone. And all of a sudden I'd gotten on it.
20:33 And then I said to everyone, oh, I'm going to London to go on this television programme.
20:39 I watched it on TV. I was quite a big fan of it.
20:42 And I kind of, like everyone, kind of screamed at the TV and kind of said, I could do that.
20:47 And so I did. It was just another adventure for me.
20:52 I had no kind of grand plans of kind of winning it.
20:56 But I think I was in it and I was in it too deep that I wasn't going to.
21:05 And for those who haven't seen it, it's a challenge. It's a competition, isn't it?
21:09 How is it set up? Is it every week you get a new challenge?
21:12 Yeah, it's kind of bake off for interior designers.
21:16 Every week would be set a challenge, whether it was a pub or a school or a hotel room.
21:22 And you'd have a very tiny budget, two days and Alan Carr kind of laughing at you over your shoulder, heckling you.
21:32 So it was quite a baptism of fire for design.
21:35 Over eight weeks, you had eight challenges and it culminated for me with a big final in Soho in London.
21:42 And we had to do up a two storey bar and cafe in the middle of Soho.
21:48 So I'd kind of come from being this broke backpacker living on Mull to then driving my van kind of past Buckingham Palace on the way to a bar in Soho for a TV show, doing it up in two days.
22:03 So it was quite a trippy whirlwind for me, but it was single handedly the best and worst thing I've ever done.
22:11 It was such a great experience, but it was so stressful.
22:15 And I mean, doing anything in two days is just really quite a feat.
22:20 So you really it's the trades people on that show that are the real stars, really.
22:26 Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. But I guess once you've done that, that opens doors.
22:31 But it also probably teaches you how to, you know, no client is ever going to be as demanding as that again, I hope.
22:38 Well, I don't know about that, actually.
22:41 I kind of long for the days where I just had two days and a small budget and, you know, I didn't have, you know, clients kind of with, you know, their own ideas.
22:53 And, you know, you want to do everything right by them.
22:56 And, you know, so I think it's probably not how the real world works, but it was a good training ground for me.
23:06 Absolutely. And did it open doors for you? Did you suddenly get knocks on the door?
23:10 Well, I mean, obviously, there was the knock on the door from the BBC with designing the Hebrides.
23:15 But in terms of interior design clients, have you had a steady flow of those as well as your TV?
23:21 Yeah, I think for me, I got some really great opportunities and some great clients from it.
23:27 And I think from the show, I really spent a lot of time and from my advertising background talking about storytelling and building spaces around stories.
23:40 And they were quite fantastical.
23:42 So I had lots of fun clients and brands and kind of commercial businesses reach out for me to help build lots of people with young families as well to help with their houses.
23:56 So I'm doing up two gorgeous Georgian houses in Bath and I'm doing up a fun kind of it's actually a digital studio.
24:05 They build games and kind of these really interesting kind of third life welds.
24:13 But they have an old Georgian four storey shop in Bath that they have no technology inside.
24:21 They have oil painters and writers and really old crafts in this space.
24:28 And I've built a little weld for them.
24:31 So full of like antiques and storytelling.
24:34 So that and that's the stuff that kind of excites me as well.
24:39 And is your is your favourite type of client the one who gives you a budget and tells you to get on with it?
24:45 I like that. I think and I think I would rather a, you know, a smaller budget than endless amounts of money, because I think that's when the creativity really kicks in.
24:58 Because you can go out and buy anything for new.
25:02 But, you know, when you when you have a smaller budget, that's when you're kind of forced to think about things a little differently.
25:09 And in that kind of tension, that's where the best ideas kind of come to life.
25:14 Absolutely. So from from that as well, as I mentioned, you were approached by the BBC about fronting, designing the Hebrides.
25:24 So what was what was the idea behind the show?
25:26 Well, I think it was just out of a conversation when when I won Interior Design Masters, they kind of asked me, what are you going to do next?
25:36 And I said, well, my dream is just to return to Mull and, you know, do do up cute little places in the Hebrides.
25:44 And I had a few clients here already.
25:48 And and and it was really quite a simple idea.
25:52 So kind of taking the idea of interior design and using that as an entry point to meet interesting people and local producers.
26:04 Yeah. And hear local stories that have it teased out through design.
26:10 And I love that with the show we've filmed this year's show already.
26:15 And we meet lots of people like farmers or crofters that, you know, it's hard life on the land.
26:22 So they need to diversify their their business and kind of set up a croft shop and a kind of agritourism business to help supplement their income because there's not much else out there for them.
26:36 So I learn about, you know, their their their family and their history of crofting and what it's like to live in a really remote place.
26:45 This is on South Uist. And to me, it's really great to be able to use interior design to to get to know people.
26:55 Yeah. And it's not not just a kind of changing rooms, quick two day makeover show.
27:01 I think it's just helping them, you know, with their lives and their livelihoods, which I absolutely.
27:09 I think it's also really nice to see all sorts of different people in our country.
27:14 And I think that very often those of us on the edges maybe are sometimes a disregard disregard.
27:22 And, you know, TV programmes, it's probably much easier to go to the central belt to film rather than South Uist or whatever.
27:28 But it is absolutely important to get these.
27:31 I think. Yeah, I think on that as well, it's important for me at least as well, not to really glamorise this either, because usually you see glossy pictures of empty beaches.
27:43 But actually it is. There's an element of living here that is beautiful, but it's sometimes actually hard.
27:50 So like you say, you can't get, you know, things delivered and, you know, it is harder to make a living.
27:56 There's certainly a problem with, you know, real estate and holiday cottages instead of kind of local kind of housing available for kind of key workers.
28:08 So there's all of these issues that I think are important to kind of touch on, not just a kind of glossy tourism show, but it's also nice to have big drone shots of the beautiful places that draws people into.
28:23 Yeah, somebody once said they were describing where I live, which is further south on the west coast than you.
28:29 But they said, oh, Kirsty lives miles away from anywhere. And I and I had to stop them.
28:34 And I said, no, no, I live at the centre of everything that's important to me.
28:40 You know, that expression miles away from anywhere.
28:44 And no, you're absolutely right in the heart of the community and everything you need is there.
28:49 It might be a little bit more challenging sometimes, but, you know, that's it.
28:55 I suppose once you've done designing the Hebrides, you were absolute or was this concurrent absolute natural choice for Scotland's Home of the Year?
29:06 Well, actually, the Scotland's Home of the Year came very quickly after Interior Design Masters.
29:13 I was just filling in for Kate, actually, who was on maternity leave, and I was on the show and I got the call up to see if I'd like to be a part of Scotland's Home of the Year.
29:24 And I jumped at it because I absolutely love the program.
29:27 It's just such a good kind of quite voyeuristic walking into people's homes.
29:33 And of course, if someone wanted to give me a job snooping through people's homes, I mean, that's the dream job.
29:41 So that came quite quickly afterwards. And it was kind of straight into quite, quite surreal, really, jumping in a van with Anna and Michael,
29:51 travelling around the country on a show that I was really fond of.
29:58 So, yeah, that was that was quite a trip. Yeah.
30:01 I mean, I've spoken to Anna and Michael before.
30:05 And what I really love about the program, and it really comes over when when you speak to any of the presenters on it,
30:11 is that all of you seem to be really sort of quite uncomfortable with the the idea of judging people.
30:18 Yeah. And what you're doing, I mean, obviously, you have to score points and that's fine.
30:24 But you're not saying this house is better than this house.
30:27 It's just, you know, exploring different ways of people, people living.
30:32 And you're not always going for the most expensive makeover or the, you know, the most the most blingy interior.
30:38 It's just homes, isn't it? Yeah, I think that's the beautiful thing about it.
30:42 And you can tell when you walk into these homes that they've put their entire self into it.
30:47 And the ones that really stand out are the ones that you really get a sense of who the person is,
30:53 not the one who can afford to go to the shops and buy the most beautiful things or afford the best architect.
31:00 It certainly helps like architecturally if the home's beautiful.
31:04 But it's that feeling you get inside the home.
31:06 And that's the biggest thing to try and communicate to the viewer, because we're in it and we can feel it and we're taking it all in.
31:15 So it's about kind of helping kind of communicate what the home is kind of giving back to us.
31:22 And the new series is coming up and there's some seriously, like quite honestly, magical homes that kind of give you that feeling.
31:31 The same feeling when you're buying a home and you walk in and you know, this is the one.
31:36 You don't know why it's the one, but this is it. This is right.
31:41 And so it's quite a privilege to, you know, for people to let us into their homes and kind of walk around it.
31:49 Absolutely. And they also have to be so secretive.
31:52 I do know because obviously I've written about some of the competitors and some of the winners before.
31:57 And I know that, you know, they've been sitting on the secret of taking part in the programme because it's all, you know, sort of a big reveal.
32:06 And that's nice. And, you know, by the time people like me get to speak to them, they're squeaking because they're so excited.
32:15 And they haven't been able to tell anyone, their friends or anyone that, you know, they've been on this competition.
32:20 But yeah, I love the Christmas one as well, even though I'm sure you must film it way before Christmas.
32:26 Yeah, I think we have to get into the Christmas spirit in November.
32:30 Yeah. So dusting off the Christmas jumper quite early.
32:36 Yeah, no, I love that one as well. I wanted to talk to you before we go.
32:39 I really wanted to talk to you about your book because having this sort of brings it all together, doesn't it?
32:44 Your experience, your professional career and the book that's just out is Wild Isles Style.
32:53 And it's all about your work on Mull.
32:57 Yeah, well, I mean, it didn't really start off as that.
33:01 I kind of had kind of got a publishing deal to write a book about interiors and my kind of take and philosophy on how I approach design.
33:12 And it kind of forced me to sit down and think about, like, my methodology and what inspires me.
33:18 And it kind of all really came back down to living on an island and being resourceful and kind of having fun with our interiors and turning interior design into a bit of an adventure.
33:30 Not taking it so seriously.
33:32 It's kind of usually design interiors, architecture has been the domain of, you know, either kind of really kind of high end things or kind of, you know, just things cobbled together.
33:46 So I was hoping to kind of join those kind of two worlds and kind of talk about craft and sourcing and making things and, you know, coming up with ideas and bringing them together and, you know, just using what you have.
34:04 Not kind of spending a fortune.
34:06 So I kind of landed on this idea of design that doesn't cost the earth.
34:10 So that's affordable.
34:12 That's good for the planet.
34:14 And for me, it's kind of through the lens of living on an island, but, and it looks at lots of the spaces I've done on Mull, but I kind of travel around the whole of the British Isles and Australia, looking at really interesting spaces that have kind of been reclaimed.
34:34 So who would you say the book would appeal to?
34:37 I think there's a little bit for everyone.
34:39 I don't think it doesn't matter what your style is, if it's kind of bohemian or rustic or modern.
34:46 I think there's something in it for everyone.
34:49 If you're interested in kind of doing things a little bit differently, kind of, if you love kind of vintage or reclaimed or things with a little bit more character and, you know, you don't probably, if your first stop's not IKEA, it might be this is the book for you.
35:10 Yeah, no, it's great.
35:11 And there are some absolutely beautiful pictures in it as well.
35:14 Absolutely great.
35:16 It's a real inspiration.
35:18 We're coming to the end of the time, but I just wondered if there was anything particular in the pipeline for you.
35:24 What are you working on this year?
35:25 What's inspiring you?
35:28 Oh, constantly inspired.
35:30 I've got lots of kind of client work coming up that I can finally share.
35:36 The thing I didn't realise is just how long it takes to really renovate houses from scratch.
35:44 So I've got a few big houses I'm just about to finish off.
35:49 I've got some fun filming coming up as well, which I can't really talk too much about.
35:56 And I'm working on another book.
35:59 So that will be hopefully out in October.
36:04 Brilliant. OK, well, I'm sure we'll come back and talk to you in October.
36:07 But for now, thank you so much, Banjo.
36:09 It's been great talking to you.
36:11 Thank you so much.
36:12 I appreciate it.
36:13 You've been listening to me, Kirsty McLuckie, on the Scotsman Property Podcast.
36:19 Listen out for the next one.
36:21 And in the meantime, if you have any comments or feedback, or if you'd be interested in partnering on any of our podcasts,
36:29 email podcasts@scotsman.com.
36:32 Till next time. Bye.
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