Designer not afraid to colour kitchen yellow

MY SPACE:Costume designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh loves bright colours. EMMA CULLINANreports

Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh is a costume designer for film, TV and theatre and teaches in Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology (IADT). Films she has worked on include The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Breakfast on Pluto, About Adamand Michael Collins. She designed the costumes for Neil Jordan's latest film Ondine. She lives in Dunboyne, Co Meath, with her husband and children.

What was it like designing costumes for Ondine?

It has lots of wet costumes in it. Colin Farrell plays a fisherman and spends a lot of time in green overalls that smell of fish. He plays opposite Polish actress Alicja Bachleda. He fishes her out of the water in his net and his daughter thinks she's a mermaid. In the film he falls in love with her and that is mirrored in real life: all happy endings.

There are a lot of people in the water, coming out of the water, going back into the water and looking like they have just been into the water. I used strong fabrics and lots of costume doubles to make sure they did not fall apart.

Does your costume design and interior design cross over?

I love colour. When I told the guy I wanted a yellow kitchen in here he luckily did it but he said that no one had ever asked him for one before. I chose it because I knew that in the long Irish winters it would be good.

And is it?

I really love it. Yellow is my daughter's favourite colour so she is perfectly happy with it and my husband loves it too. We have two children (a daughter aged seven and a son aged two) so we can't be too precious.

We have to have stuff that can be kicked around a bit and which, if it gets damaged, will not have us in floods of tears. We don't worry about it. Everything gets spills and scraped, that pink crayon on the white table is from this morning.

And the white floor?

It's not as hard to keep clean as you would think - the floor we had before was black and we just wanted everything to be bright. We put in a Velux window to try and get as much light in and the floor reflects that. The Velux made a huge difference.

People say that bright kitchen colours date easily?

You should never listen to other people. You know more about how you want to live in your house than other people do.

You can get good advice but if you really want something, try it, if it doesn't work then you know you have bad taste and you learn a lesson but you've got to try. These days people think they have to defer to other people all the time.

At the same time someone else can come in and have a fantastic idea and have great input but you don't need it for everything.

Even with a garden people think they have to get someone in to tell them what to plant.

When I was a kid it was about rebelling - where are all the rebels?

With clothes design, it's not about trying to second guess what someone wants because then she will look boring.

A good architect and designer is someone who goes beyond expectations; the person who says "come on, let's move into the 21st century".

People are excited by that - the idea that they could be more than people perceive them as.

And the yellow sideboard?

It came from Ikea. I love Ikea. It was remarkable walking around the corner and seeing that in the same yellow as the kitchen: bizarre. I got the mirror in Belfast. About 10 years ago I was working on a film there and there was an auction across the road where I got the mirror.

I threw it into the big truck we were working from. Very easy.

Do you often pick up pieces when you do films?

When I was working on In AmericaI bought three lamps in one of the markets. I brought them home packed in the costume boxes. You are not really meant to do that but costumes make a great packaging material.

When you go away everything looks new and exciting, especially when you live in a small country and see the same stuff, so you can get a bit carried away but I am not a huge impulse buyer. I am always looking for a bargain.

The rose chairs came from Brown Thomas. A production designer called Fiona Daly tipped me off about them. We had worked together on About Adam, with Kate Hudson and Gerry Stembridge.

We had these chairs in minty green on the film. I said, 'I love those', but someone had already bought them. Later Fiona phoned and said: 'They have those chairs in BT and they are half price.' I have been dragging them around ever since.

I got the wicker sofa from a St Vincent de Paul shop in Dublin. A lot of props people in film, especially if it is low budget, would go down there and get things really cheaply.

Props people have all the secret places to go. The sofa is very 1960s: I imagined that it had come out of some lovely old lady's house and got a second chance.

Do people often buy the props at the end of a film?

There is always a sale at the very end. You have to be really quick and get in at the beginning and see something coming in on set. I don't tend to get stuff any more because I am trying to declutter. I keep thinking, do I really want that?

Where are your pictures from?

The little one is by Sarah Walker who lives in Castletownbere. She has a daughter called Iris and this is Iris on her bicycle when she was about a year and a half. I love Sarah's paintings of wild flowers.

I got the Tim Mara print because there was a retrospective exhibition of his work in IMMA years ago. He was a master print maker who worked in London. I went with my friend Judith and we both loved these prints.

Her husband phoned Tim's wife in London and she said 'I have some at home for sale'. So I bought one. I love it.

It's a real study of texture, colours and form from the 1970s. You don't see that shade of pink, brown and green now.

The holy picture is by my great-great-grandfather. It used to be in granny's house in the bedroom we slept in. I really liked it but thought it was a bit creepy. My great-great-grandfather, James McCormack, was a painter in churches; there is still some of his work in Thurles Cathedral. When granny died my uncle got the painting and he had it on loan for a number of years to a museum in Thurles but he knew I loved it and eventually gave it to me. It is in a lovely naïve style and is of a rock Mass during penal times in Ireland. It is based on a painting in the National Gallery in Dublin. It dates from the 1880s. I love having something that goes back, a connection with the past. It reminds me of my granny and all of that.

When did you extend the house?

Originally this was an 1850s cottage. It was thatched until, probably, the 1950s. A little old man next door remembered it as a three-room cottage: this kitchen was in two rooms when we bought the house: we took off the back wall and put a new strip on the back (which is what the kitchen units are in now).

It was done in stages: we knocked out the wall about 10 years ago but there was still a partition wall then; then two years ago we did all this. It doesn't feel like just a kitchen but a livingroom too. When my daughter comes home from school she does her homework here. My son plays around here and my husband or I cook at the same time. It's brilliant, there's room for everybody. I can do work here.

When we first put an extension on here 10 years ago the space was designed by a builder who said he couldn't take out a partition wall. Then, when we updated the room, we had a very nice builder, Francie, and spoke to him about knocking the wall here he said could do that - he put in an RSJ (rolled steel joist), that's all it needed.

At that stage I was so desperate to get the partition down I felt like kicking it myself.

It was a messy job: there was dust everywhere. My son was just a few months old.

Everyone was saying 'are you crazy?', but it was the easiest time because he was not running round and I was breastfeeding. We stayed in the house while the work was being done and spent most of the time camping out in the livingroom and eating takeaways.

Most people don't like having builders around but Francie would arrive and I'd just burst out laughing. He always had a big grin on his face.

Everything was done on time. He had a good business head: he knew how to keep people happy and get in and get out.

"You should never listen to other people. You know more about how you want to live in your house than other people do