Friends - and furnishings

Eoin Lyons knows an awful lot of people: fashion designers, artists, actors, accountants, property developers, furniture makers, magazine editors, owners of flower shops, people who make shoes, ladies who lunch. They are all his friends.

Sooner or later, if you'r e a friend of Eoin's, you are going to end up being photographed and he will pick your brains about your style for one of his columns in The Irish Times. Where did that cabinet come from? How that colour got chosen? What your sofa is all about. Where you like to lounge about on Sunday mornings and what coffee you like to drink.

Gently he will persuade you to go public on the most intimate details of your decor. Before you know it, you have opened your address book and told him about the brilliant man who makes blinds or the painters who really understand colour and can mix just the right shade of white. It's this kind of detail that fills his new book, Style Source Ireland Interiors. Ok the title is a little cumbersome, but don't mind that.

This is an interiors book with a difference, since all the homes featured are Irish, not plucked from the international bank of homes that appear with monotonous regularity in interiors magazines the world over. Better still, each page has a list of suppliers that will help you order up anything from an elaborate set of bookshelves to a hand-embroidered quilt for a child's bed.

There are names and addresses for kitchen makers and curtain makers; for people who will fit a television screen over your bath or into your fridge door or lay a wooden floor when they say they are going to do it and within budget; for tiny out-of-the-way shops selling French antiques and Spanish porcelain and for lighting designers who will show you where to put your spots. And did you know that your bathroom should always smell of Orange Blossom fragrance from L'Occitane? This and more you will find in what's bound to become a big Christmas gift - and not just among Eoin's many friends.

Style Source Ireland Interiors by Eoin Lyons is published by Currach Books, price €25