About

I think everyone deserves to be happy in their homes and to have access to good design.

I grew up in Cork Ireland in the 1970/1980s. Ireland was often viewed as drab back then, but I had a happy childhood and used my imagination, fostered by my love of reading and film, as a creative escape. I imagined the spaces I read about in books and absorbed the interior sets of movies.

My Mam was a true homemaker in every sense of the word. She had taste and despite lacking the funds, she managed to create a sense of contentment at home. I was fascinated by my fathers family home, which was a pub attached to the home. I would make excuses to use the bathroom just so I could peer into the upstairs living room, where there was lovely old furniture, china, silverware etc.

My Dad was vice principal at a private boarding school for boys and I loved visiting the school usually in the summer when the students had gone home for their holidays. The images that stand out to me are the staff room with its leather chaise longue, the enormous mahogany dining table, floor tiles, wide staircases, heavy doors as well as the wooden workbenches in the labs where my dad taught.

My parents built our family home on a third of an acre gifted from my maternal grandfather. As a result, we were unique among my childhood friends and relatives. We were the only ones to build our home, have two bathrooms, a study, utility room etc. My Dad had sent off to England for a book on house plans before building our home and, consequently, the design was a bit different from the usual bungalows built at that time.

In primary school, I won second place in an essay competition titled ‘If I was Lord Mayor’. I wrote about the derelict buildings in Cork and the value that restoring them would bring to Cork, both aesthetically but also to the community in regards to pride in our history.

After university, travel opened up a whole new source of inspiration and influence, helping to broaden and educate my eye. My first foreign trip was a school trip to Paris, which gave me a taste of what was out there to be discovered. The next time I went abroad was my second year in university for a summer job in London, where there was so much to see in between working.

After graduating from university, I moved to England for work. It was the first time I didn’t share a bedroom with my sisters however, as a rental, I had a limited amount of control over the décor. It was during this time that I discovered interior design magazines, which are my version of heaven!

After leaving England, I moved to America, Scotland, England again and finally Ireland in 2003. Travel remains a great inspiration and I have been lucky to have experienced and visited a wide number of countries.

For the first ten years of my marriage, we moved on average every year due to the nature of my husband’s work and each time the house had a different architectural style. Each one had its own set of challenges, but I just loved the whole process of decorating and ‘setting up home’. After spending almost 15 years abroad, my husband and I moved back to Ireland and built our home in 2009 with our two children. I learned a lot from that experience: working with an architect, project manager, trades etc.

Despite my passion for interiors and transforming spaces, it still hadn’t clicked for me that this could be a career option for me. I just thought it was something I enjoyed and happened to be good at. I did a number of short courses at KLC School of Design in London and now that my kids are college going, I was ready to set up my own business and take my hobby to the next level after years of successfully transforming the spaces of friends and family.

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