HE is helping make property dreams come true all over the UK, but Scot Kerr Drummond says there’s no place like home.
The Glasgow-born designer, who has become a big hit through TV show Coast vs Country, says the one property he’d really love is back in his native city.
“I live in your standard two-up, two-down terrace in Oxford,” said Kerr.
“The only thing that sets it apart is that it’s about 50 yards from the River Thames, so I can walk along that to the city centre or the other way into the countryside.
“It’s a lovely location, but my aspiration would be to return to Glasgow.
“I’m back a lot visiting family and friends and I love the big, old Victorian villas in the West End and South Side.
“That’s where I see myself ending up. Or maybe just a nice flat in the city centre.
“But last year we had a property on the show that was just awesome. It was a Victorian villa on the outskirts of Kilgreggan in Argyll. While a lot of those types of houses have been spoiled, it was virtually untouched.
“There were stunning views over the water and it was a jaw-dropping place.”
Coast vs Country has become a real daytime favourite on Channel 4, with Kerr showing prospective buyers round three seaside options and fellow presenter Kirsty Duffy giving them a trio of countryside alternatives.
The properties are varied and the choices plentiful, but they are so well tailored to the potential purchasers that many do end up buying.
“I’ve just done my 250th house tour in the past three years,” revealed Kerr. “So I’ve seen a heck of a lot of properties.
“There are such a range that I don’t get bored or blasé.
“And with my interior designer head on, I’m always looking at what they’ve done and thinking I either would or wouldn’t have done it that way.”
Kerr’s TV career hasn’t been the result of any carefully-calculated plan.
He has his own interior design business in Oxford and got a call one day from a production company asking if he’d like to talk to them about working on a show called Kitchen SOS.
“They pretty much said, ‘Do you fancy being on telly?’ and I thought they were taking the mick.
“I went along for a meeting thinking it would be production people and found Nadia Sawalha, who was the presenter and ran the company, sitting there on the couch.
“We hit it off straight away and I ended up doing 20 episodes of that.
“ I went back to my day job afterwards, thinking it had been a nice experience, and then Channel 4 came to me with Coast vs Country.
“This is the third series and it’s going from strength to strength.”
The result of the success is that Kerr’s “day job” of his design business has had to take more of a back seat.
“With TV you never know where your next gig is coming from, so when I was doing series one I was still full-on with the business.
“I was going away to film on a Sunday night, getting back on a Thursday night and I’d be back in my showroom again on a Friday morning.
“It just got too much.
“It was very stressful and I’ve had to slow things down.
“I have a few months off from TV coming up and I will get more involved, although I tend to have one or two jobs ticking along at any one time.” And scaling back his workload has given Kerr a bit of time for romance, too.
“I think I might finally have met ‘the one’,” smiles Kerr. “It’s been about 10 months. Her name is Dani and she’s from Scotland, which always helps.
“She was on a night out and it was a bit like love at first sight.
“It really was like a movie scene, our eyes meeting across a crowded room.
“We’ve been seeing each other just as much as we possibly can ever since.”
Coast vs Country, Channel 4, Mon-Fri, 3pm.
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