Longford writer Adrian Duncan succumbs to bungalow bliss
Bungalow Bliss, first published in 1971, was a book of house designs that buyers could use to build a home for themselves affordably.
It first appeared two years before Ireland was to join the EEC as a self-published catalogue by Jack Fitzsimons from his Kells Art Studios in County Meath.
He and his wife designed and collated it and printed it locally.
Fitzsimons sold these books out of his car to newsagents, petrol garages and bookshops.
Over the course of thirty years, Fitzsimons sold over a quarter of a million copies of his catalogue.
The first edition contained twenty designs – the final edition contained two hundred and sixty.
This guidebook of how to build your own home radically transformed housing in Ireland.
It gave a generation an option outside of emigration and housing lists.
Now, for the first time, author and structural engineer Adrian Duncan looks at the cultural impact that Bungalow Bliss and the accessible bungalow design had on the housing market, the Irish landscape, and on the individual families who made these bungalows their homes.
Little Republics: The Story of Bungalow Bliss by Ballymahon author Adrian Duncan is a reappraisal of the Bungalow Bliss book and the tens of thousands of houses that came from it.
His first work of non-fiction looks at what these houses are: What they were built from, why they look the way they do, why they were so popular, why they were so hated, why they fell out of fashion, and what meaning and value this ageing housing stock has on the land today.
Little Republics: The Story of Bungalow Bliss is a 30k-word essay, written for a general readership. The book features eight chapters with an appendix and there are 80+ colour images and scans.
Adrian, who originally trained as an engineer, is a visual artist and filmmaker.
His acclaimed debut novel, Love Notes from a German Building Site, published by Lilliput and Head of Zeus in 2019, was shortlisted for the Dalkey Emerging Writer Award and won the inaugural John McGahern Annual Book Prize.
His second novel, A Sabbatical in Leipzig, was published by Lilliput in 2020 and is forthcoming in the UK from Tuskar Rock Press (Profile Books).
It was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award 2020.
His first short story collection, Midfield Dynamo, was published in 2021.
And it was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Most recently, his third novel, The Geometer Lobachevsky, was co-published by the Lilliput Press in Ireland and by Tuskar Rock Press (Profile Books) in the UK in April 2022.