Let there be light through iron and lace

DesignSolutionsProblem: Adele King - aka Twink - lives in a Georgian house with a traditional layout, one that includes two large reception rooms on either side of the entrance hall mirrored on the first floor by two other rooms of the same size.

On the upper level, these have provided her with a spacious suite: one room is a bedroom and the other, across the hall, is a dressingroom. The house now holds all sorts of comforts but when she bought it some years ago, she says it was a case of "the teeth are fine but the gums have to go".

The place needed structural work. When it came to decorating "I wanted something different to the traditional Georgian style", says Adele. So she went to interior designer Sharon Creagh who runs an interiors shop in Rathgar.

"It's like a doll's house," says Adele of the store. "My daughters and I always say that if we had a desert island shop, hers would be it."

With Creagh's help, Adele's bedroom and dressingroom were given a blast of French style with Toile de Jouy fabrics, painted cream dressing tables and soft upholstered armchairs. In the bedroom there are three sash windows, two to the front and one to the side.

"One of the things the Georgians knew how to do really well was bring light into a building. Even on the dullest day, this house fills with light." Even so, only the windows to the front were curtained and the third, above the bed, was not.

"Sharon thought three sets of drapes in the room would be too much and I agreed."

The plus side of the un-curtained window was that it made the space more airy and did not obstruct views of the Dublin mountains, but the downside was that the room looked a little unfinished.

Solution: "The window looked like there was something missing. We left it like that for a while and didn't know what to do with it," says Adele.

"Eventually Sharon called and said she had just the thing. It was an old French pelmet she had found in a house in France."

Made from wrought iron and probably dating from the late 19th century, it has a pretty decorative detail to the front. Curtains would have once fallen from inside the pelmet but Sharon had an idea to drape a very lightweight lace fabric across it instead: "It gives a kind of canopy effect above the bed," says the designer. "The draped fabric softens the look of the window." The original shutters provide privacy. "I stripped back 300 layers of lead paint and treated them with silicone wax," says Adele. "Underfloor heating in the room protects the wood from drying out."

Because it's so heavy, securing the pelmet to the wall proved to be a bigger job than either woman anticipated. "The guy who put it up said 'are you sure about this? It'll kill you if it comes down in the middle of the night'. So it's up for life now. The walls are so old it had to be bracketed halfway into the Dublin Mountains and then screwed into place."

The lace, available for €30 a metre at Sharon's store, is used plentifully and cascades down either side of the bed.

Garlands of artificial berries fall from the top, the last touch in a solution that compliments the style of Adele's bedroom but also has the desired effect of decorating the window without the heaviness of traditional curtains.

Sharon Creagh Interiors

57 Highfield Road, Rathgar, D6 Tel 01 4970731