When interior designer Lisa Marconi moved to a 1950s semi-D with her husband and two young sons four years ago, it was not to her dream home — or even her dream area.
“But it felt completely right for us,” she says of 5 Upper Churchtown Road in Dublin 14. “It has lovely big rooms. Everything is on just two levels and the garden is huge with apple and pear trees and it’s really idyllic. We just fell in love with it in terms of it being so right for our family right then.”
The house, which is now on the market with Lisney for €895,000, was quite different to the family’s previous home, a period townhouse in Portobello. “We loved it but it had no outdoor space and we’d just had our second child, another boy. We wanted a nice big garden for the boys to run around in.”
Having only ever lived in period homes and not knowing Churchtown at all, the house was a bit of a surprise for her. “Apart from the garden, I loved the size of the rooms and the height of the ceilings. There’s a feeling of space and unless you have four million quid you don’t get that in a period house.
“It felt like a happy house. I thought it would be lovely for small children. Our old house was on three levels with concrete steps going down to the basement — it couldn’t be less child-friendly!”
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Aside from Marconi putting her own stamp on the décor over the past four years, the property is much as they found it then. The site is about a fifth of an acre and the house is about 195 sq m including the garage, which is being used for storage.
An exterior porch extends across the front of the entrance hall and the main living room. Inside, past the hall and living room, are an open plan sitting and dining room with sliding doors out to the garden, and a separate kitchen at the side. The exterior door in the kitchen leads to a covered side passage that can be accessed from the front and back gardens and has a door into the garage.
Upstairs, the main bedroom with its en suite shower room are on one side of the split staircase, while two double bedrooms and a single, the family bathroom and separate lavatory are on the other.
The outside space is substantial. At the front, there’s off-street parking as well as a decent lawn. The back garden is quite long with mature hedging and trees.
Marconi planned to add to the living space. “But we did that thing where you spend every single penny on the house itself so we had no money left.”
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Instead, she decorated and, if the house looks like a slice of Dublin 8 in suburbia, this was very much the intention. “I’d be more of a town person,” Marconi says. “I’m from London and I’d lived in Stoneybatter and Portobello since moving to Dublin.
“It was quite a leap going to a very different kind of house in a very different location. I really wanted to put our personality into it.”
This meant bringing in colour and that can be seen to most dramatic effect in the hall, where the walls, stairs, floors, doors, skirting and radiator are painted a very dark blue. To lighten things up, Marconi added wallpaper with a lightning bolt motif up to wainscoting height.
The living and dining rooms have been painted green and Marconi has added some pieces of furniture that reflect the house’s vintage, as well as fun and brightly coloured accessories and upcycled pieces. Beige brick fireplaces in the living and dining rooms have been repainted grey.
In the kitchen she replaced the flooring with geometric black and white tiles and painted the units black. Wood-panelled walls are now light pink and the dresser is a striking yellow.
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There’s more pink in the main bedroom upstairs, including a velvet covering on the wall behind the bed and on the ceiling. The tiled en suite is the only room in the house that hasn’t had some kind of makeover. The other grown-up bedroom has also been given the pink treatment, while the single bedroom — used as a playroom — is bright yellow, and the children’s room is blue and white.
The family bathroom has pink, grey and black tiles on the wall, arranged in a herringbone design.
Marconi describes the style as slightly glam rock. “I like a bit of glam and having fun with our home. I think I’m the same when I’m designing other people’s houses. It’s about bringing your personality in and layering it with bits and pieces that say ‘you’. I didn’t have a big budget and I wouldn’t have spent it even if I had because at some point we were going to renovate or extend. I just wanted to make it a fun, colourful and interesting house.”
The fact that the children were three and six months old when they moved in was also a factor. “I didn’t want to spend money on expensive finishes because everything gets wrecked. Once you emerge from the tiny baby stage you can start thinking about nicer finishes and nicer things in your house.”
Marconi’s long-term renovation and extension plans included replacing the porch with an extended living room and hall, returning the main door to the front of the house and re-rendering. She wanted to knock down the wall between the living and dining rooms and create an arch between them.
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The garage was to be converted into a playroom and utility room. Replacing the windows so they would be in keeping with the style of the house was also on the list. And she wanted to extend the kitchen, which — together with the main bedroom suite above — were pre-1964 additions to the house.
“If we had the funds we were going to do that next year,” she says. “If not, it would have been the year after. We were also going to extend up into the attic, which is gigantic.
“It’s one of the reasons we love the house — it just has so much scope. And you could do things bit by bit. It’s perfectly liveable and there’s loads of space, but there’s potential to make it really wow.”
Instead of realising those plans herself, Marconi and her family are opting for a new adventure and a relocation to Skibbereen in west Cork.
This time, it is to her dream home. “It’s just the kind of beautiful, big period house I adore. It also has lovely gardens and stables we could convert into Airbnbs.”
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The fact that Skibbereen is a tech hub ties in nicely with her own plans. She has recently finished an entrepreneur accelerator programme and is in the process of creating a digital interior design platform, Design Led (designled.io). “I’m building a tech start-up and can do my job from anywhere.”
Her husband has a Dublin-based business and will be travelling back and forth but also has plans to start another operation in Cork.
Marconi says she told her husband how happy she was in Churchtown just before having her head turned by the Skibbereen house. “It’s a very nice place to live and we have lovely neighbours.”
But the attractions of Skibbereen have proved too many to pass up. “The house is gorgeous and we can afford it. And we just thought it would be a bit of adventure.
“This is the time to do it, when the kids are small and before they start senior school. It would work for us and the kids are really up for it so we thought, why not? You only live once.”
