EACH WEEK, WE ask someone based in Ireland with a passion for interiors to share one photo of their favourite spot in their home.
Jennifer Henry lives in an Edwardian period home in Dublin with her husband and daughter.
“We bought our home in 2014 and, while it was always our plan to redecorate and extend in time, we did not expect to embark on a renovation journey almost immediately,” says Jennifer.
When restoring, you definitely need a good dose of naivete on your side. We are currently just about to lay tiles in our hallway and that will be the very last step in the renovation of the original house.
This week, Jennifer (@renovating_corahouse) chatted us through her favourite spot: her sitting room.
I love this room because it’s spacious and bright with a huge bay window to the front, and it has high ceilings. We had to reinforce and re-plaster the ceilings, but we painstakingly retained and restored the original coving and ceiling roses, which was not an easy task.
Our interior style is quite light and bright and this is reflected in the rest of the house. However, we chose to make this room feel cosier and chose a gorgeous deep blue for the walls. I also love the parquet floor in this room, which we sourced and fitted ourselves. It was definitely a labour of love. We then chose a beautiful limestone fireplace to compliment the look. This fireplace was made to measure and we got it made extra tall in order to accentuate the high ceilings and the feeling of height in this room.
My favourite object has to be the chest of drawers in the corner. It was the very first piece of furniture that I bought for the house. I bought it secondhand the week before we moved in and it was a dark brown colour, which was lovely, but I knew that I wanted to do something different with it in time. It was such a gorgeous piece with unusual curves and detail.
We had to move out of the house shortly after that due to the renovation and the chest would not fit in our tiny storage unit, so my aunt looked after it for nearly three years. It finally found its way back to our house and it was moved around many rooms as we tried to get the interior of the house into some shape. I’m not going to lie, it’s so heavy and it was a bone of contention for a while as my husband was trying to lay floors, and so he had to constantly shuttle the chest around single-handedly as I was heavily pregnant. We finished this room shortly after we had Emily in 2018. While on maternity leave, I decided that I wanted to paint the chest a deep rich colour. I then sprayed the handles silver to give them a new lease on life. I totally associate this piece with that long, hot summer of 2018 while I was on maternity leave.
It would be hard not to take inspiration from all of the amazing homes on Instagram. There is a real Irish community of DIY-ers and designers coming to the fore. There are a lot of interior accounts that go really bold with dark colours and, while I certainly was inspired by the look, I didn’t want anything too extreme. We wanted a cosy room which was still bright and fresh with clean lines. We struck a balance by just painting the top half of the walls blue and then white panelling on the bottom.
Not much, really. We have another identical room across the hallway which is our home office and Emily’s playroom, and we try to contain toys in the kitchen and the playroom. I am allergic to clutter and I am a very organised person by nature.
I am forever de-cluttering and always have a clothes bag and household items bag on the go to drop down to the charity shops when they are full. I like a tidy home and I am a firm believer that everything should have a place. It makes for easier and stress-free living, especially when we all have busy lives.
At the moment, there is a back window in the room which looks out onto our garden. In the New Year, we plan to add an extension to our kitchen and change this window to double doors, which will lead into our new kitchen extension. As it is a period home, we have big reception rooms to the front of the house, but our kitchen and utility are quite small in comparison. Therefore, we intend to square off the back of the house with a small extension, which should make a good sized kitchen/utility and then link it into this room, making a comfortable L-shaped living space.
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