MY SPACE:Interior designer Steve Dunne spent a year in his cottage before revamping it in great style, says EMMA CULLINAN

Steve Dunne is an interior designer who works in Ireland and beyond and he has a slot on the South Tonight programme on Southern Television. He lives in a two-bed terraced cottage on a hill in Cork city.

How long have you lived here?

I bought the house in November 2006 because of the view, from the front bedroom window on the first floor, of the whole of the north side of Cork city; you can see three cathedrals. It’s fabulous by night, all twinkling lights.

I lived in the house for 12 months before doing anything to it, to get a feel for it.

What was it like living in it in its raw state?

I felt like a hobo. I took up the flooring and had bare concrete. I painted the whole place white. I had some furniture and collected more as the year went on, knowing it would fit in when the house was ready.

At the back, where the kitchen and bathroom are, there was a lean-to with an asbestos roof – now there’s a glass brick wall there – and you had to go through the kitchen to get to the shower room.

By the end of the year I knew what I didn’t want more than I did. I got a team of brilliant Polish builders who did every single thing I asked for, all in six weeks.

I knew I wanted a bath, which I didn’t have before, and I wanted a hole in the wall where there used to be a huge fireplace: I didn’t want that big monstrosity coming in on me. When I first bought the house there was a door to the right of the front door and a door ahead to a cupboard under the stairs but I took these out and opened up the space.

When I lifted the kitchen lino I realised there had been no foundation dug out – there was just a layer of cement – it was really damp. Four skips later we had the foundations dug.

I then reinforced the kitchen and bathroom ceiling so they could take a roof garden. This house had no garden, and I love gardening, so I created one.

There is no training like practical training and this house was achieved through trial and error especially in the early days.

What else did you do?

I put down a new engineered timber floor with a bleached lime look to keep it all open. Deep-veined natural timber would close in on me and the space needed opening up.

Solid travertine marble flooring runs through the kitchen and bathroom and I brought it up the wall by the bath.

I didn’t want lights in the ceiling, especially a pendant light because you’d have to bend down to avoid it. I just wanted lights on the walls. I don’t miss a central light at all. In the evening I turn the wall lights on low and have the table lamp on and the lighting in the goldfish bowl, so you can see the fish dancing around as I sit on the couch watching TV. They are called Karen and Jack – from Will and Grace – how clichéd is that?

Where did you get the fish bowl?

My brother Anthony bought it. He’s a qualified carpenter and works with me full-time.

What’s it like working with family?

It’s good once you keep the work side of things separate to family and private life. We’ve got to a nice balance. We had a few hiccups at the start but who doesn’t? It’s fabulous now, I know his work is excellent and we feed off each other: I give creative ideas – although there is a bit of artistic licence on each side – and he knows the practical side of achieving a look.

When I took the banisters off the stairs, and blocked up the door into the kitchen at the base of them,

Anthony built two steps curving around at the bottom: now if I do fall down the stairs I can be swept around into the livingroom instead of collapsing into the kitchen – although the only person I’ll be impressing is myself.

How did you become an interior designer?

I went to Grennan Mill Art and Craft college in Co Kilkenny and, when I’d done that, my parents thought I should do something more reliable, so I did an interior design course in Cork city and have been here ever since (I grew up in Co Waterford) except for two years in Australia and New Zealand. I’d worked for a company in Cork for 10 years doing showhouses and thought, if there’s one thing I do before I die, it’s go to New Zealand. I spent three months working in a small interior design boutique then, one day, the editor of a national newspaper rang the shop. I answered the phone and he said, ‘nice accent, is that Irish?’ One thing led to another and he did an article on me using photographs of the showhouses I had worked on in Cork. He was a bit perplexed as to why an interior designer from Europe had settled in New Zealand.

After the article appeared I was headhunted by a shop in Wellington similar to Brown Thomas to design and make window displays, it was absolutely fabulous.

After a year there I went to Sydney and did window displays in the year of the Olympics. I went to an exhibition where there were black and white photos of Australian Olympians. I asked the photographer if I could put them in a window display. The head honcho of a large store saw them and I was offered a job in his shop.

When I came back to Ireland I set up in business. I was very lucky, the Celtic Tiger was still going and two years isn’t such a long time to be away, nobody had forgotten me. I did showhouses left, right and centre which was brilliant and then I did an episode of Showhouse on RTÉ1, in Ring, Co Waterford. I won that episode which was great. So things started to snowball.

Did the programme lead to more business?

While it didn’t lead to a huge upsurge, it certainly raised my profile. People who know you would say they saw you on it and Cork city is not huge so you would walk down Patrick Street and be asked by somebody, ‘is it you?’ It’s good, it’s funny, it’s nice.

And now that the tiger has gone?

You have to adjust and become versatile. I’m willing to travel anywhere. I find it very interesting working in different countries and you come back with new ideas to introduce here.

Where have you been?

I did a penthouse in Bogota, I have a German client in Grand Canaria, I’m doing a home in Cannes, for Irish clients; one in Bow in London and an awful lot around here.

How do people find you?

A lot is word of mouth. My American clients in Bogota did their research: I have a website. He bought an absolutely huge property in Co Waterford which had been decorated by the developers to a very basic standard.

He approached me and I gave him ideas on paper because he was based in the US. He said, ‘go ahead and just do it’, it was great from that point of view and there was no budget.

Where do buy things from?

I buy at the higher end around Cork city, in Casey’s Furniture and Top Drawer, and I will go to Dublin if I have to. I shopped locally for the London clients and went shopping in Cannes with those clients. There is a great choice in France with every style of furniture you could want, such as Ligne Roset. The fabric choices were good but there were a lot of the same brand names as there are here, although that was good because I was familiar with them.

Gran Canaria is the worst for choice but my German client is prepared to ship things in. He bought a lot on the internet and I went out to see that everything was okay and was put in the right position.

Since the downturn it has been unbelievable how shop assistants will facilitate you. It’s great and is how it should be but, for a while, it was not like that. I went to France two weeks ago to buy furniture for the clients in Cannes and, when the shops realise you are there to spend serious money, coffee is put on and champagne is chilled. They can’t speak English for the first 10 minutes and then suddenly they are fluent.

What furniture do you like?

I like contemporary but it has to be comfortable, usable and livable with. I also like to mix classical and contemporary but you have to be very careful to get the balance – you can upset it very easily. With clients, I work around how they live and can cater to their tastes.

Where did you buy your furniture for this house?

I got the Barcelona chair and Eileen Gray table in Ideal Living in Cork. The solid walnut shelves came from Casey’s Furniture. The Kartell Bourgie lamp came from a friend who asked what I’d like as a house-warming present, a friend also gave me my little set of Audrery Hepburn mugs. I got the shaggy carpet to soften everything. It’s amazing shag pile is back in vogue: in the 1980s people couldn’t wait to rip it out.

In a small space you need to step back from it, look at it and put thought into it. Really and truly size matters and you can cause absolute disaster by having wrong size pieces.

I wanted a small house because I am not here a lot of the time and maintaining it would be too much of a headache. It’s a lovely sanctuary to come home to. I put on the fire and music and unwind, and I don’t need to think about rooms in the east or west wing that need to be cleaned.