2 Bedroom, 84m2 in Dún Laoghaire

Last summer I had a very special client. A couple of young professionals bought a two bedroom apartment in Dún Laoghaire, which is a marvellous beach town, located 10km from Dublin. They worked in tech, were avid travellers, loved life, love, futurism and long bike rides. They asked me to help them create a space that would serve them as an Irish harbour in life. 

We had an initial meeting to go through desires and expectations. We agreed beforehand that my clients would collect visual ideas on Pinterest of what they were particularly fond of. And with some likes and dislikes references I started working on a moodboard suggesting the look and feel of every room in the apartment. My contribution as an interior designer at this stage was advising on what goes well as an ensemble and suggesting solutions to satisfy my clients’ needs.

What if you are not sure what exactly you want? When I have couples of families as a client, it normally takes some time to decide on design choices about furniture or colour schemes. It is hard to find a compromise. I believe that agreeing in the beginning on the general style defines the border in the game. There are many styles to choose from: mid-century, Scandinavian, boho, smart, industrial, rustic, etc. Mid-century style, for example, has a set of attributes like earthy pastel colour palette, furniture elevated on legs, and a lot of floor and table lighting solutions. Once you have style as a guide, you have plenty of reference points. 

The next step in the process was taking dimensions of the space and creating a spatial layout plan. This apartment was empty with a few wardrobes and kitchen built-in. That gave freedom of building things from scratch. The process of creating a suggested furniture layout reminds me of a jigsaw puzzle. Your bed, sofa, storage solutions and lighting schemes are all the elements of a bigger picture. An experienced designer will arrange a well-designed space to create the best structural flow and improve your quality of life. It took us a few attempts but we managed to find an arrangement that suited the clients needs in the best way possible.

I’ve drafted lighting and electrical plans that were passed along to the builders and in no time we approached furniture scheduling. Normally, the outcome of this exercise is an excel spreadsheet containing a table of various furniture choices, pricing, names of retailers and delivery estimates. In Ireland the experience of furniture shopping takes effort and patience. The choice, unfortunately, is quite limited and oftentimes we are scrolling through online catalogues of Europe mainland furniture retailers to get more interesting pieces. My advice here is to keep in mind the delivery time that can reach up to a few months for the item to arrive.

I was very lucky with this client, since they trusted my recommendations. In the end, the furniture and accessories arrived from different parts of the world. But it actually resonated with the owners, since they love traveling so much. My intent was to make the space look more homely yet unusual. As broad for interpretation as it could be, I took on the challenge. I hope that the end result turned out satisfying and my clients enjoy spending time at home.