Adrian Wistriech ran a marketing company in London but followed his dream to become an artist. He bought a home in Cork and converted it into an art school, writes EMMA CULLINAN.

Adrian Wistriech is a ceramic artist who is also involved in Kinsale Arts Week and promotes cultural tourism locally. He runs the Kinsale Pottery and Arts Centre, Ballinacurra, Kinsale, which opened in 2000 in the outbuildings of an 18th century farm. He works and lives there, with his wife Val.

What attracted you to this house and the area?

I was sick of London and wanted to come and live in Ireland. Kinsale was the only place that Val, who is from north Cork, would come to. It’s near the airport which is good because both of us do some work in London. I do bits of market analysis in my spare time.

Kinsale has changed and grown. Cork house prices exceeded Kinsale at the bottom end which was strange because Cork is generally cheaper than Kinsale. So a lot of Cork people moved to Kinsale and commuted. Then Eastern Europeans came to work here, there were 13 per cent Polish in the town recently, so the community changed again. But although Kinsale has changed, it is still a really good community.

I found this house on the internet from London and bought it from a vet and his wife who had raised eight children here.

The house was part of the Ballinacurra House estate; a huge farm with hundreds of acres. The Bleasby family was in there for hundreds of years. In the 1950s they had a butler called Sam who used to cycle along road to Kinsale and children ran along behind the bike because they had never seen a black man. There is a mural on the wall of the main house with him on the bicycle.

We bought this house – at the time of the Celtic kitten – for the price of a two or three-bedroom flat in London. We had lived in a terraced house in Crouch End so it was a real change coming to open space.

I wanted the place because of the outbuildings: they fitted exactly what I wanted to do. I had been running a market-research publishing company with 40 staff and was sick to death of employing people.

I was spending 50 hours a week in the office but had always wanted to be an artist. I had been doing pottery night classes for 15 years in London – doing what I teach now – so I nicked their course model: when I get enough people I run the class.

I also bring in teachers who know about other subjects, such as glass work, bronze casting, silk painting, book making and binding, animation, photography, drama and creative writing. Students are locals and people from abroad: one 83-year-old has been coming for nine years.

Why do you teach rather than make pots full-time?

It is difficult for craftspeople trying to sell to outlets, such as galleries or shops. It’s hard work – and galleries can go bust – so I decided to do a bit of retail but I mainly teach, and the teaching is so busy. But I’m delighted to get a retail opportunity like the one at Brown Thomas Design Week.

How old is the original house?

At its centre is a 200-year-old cottage and bits were added in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

When we tried to sort out the central heating it was a nightmare because the house had been added to, added to, added to.

The main reason we bought the house was the view of Ballinacurra creek, this was where the English landed in 1601 – opposed by a force led by Hugh O’Neill – and attacked Kinsale.

What work did you need to do to the place?

I converted the outbuildings into a pottery, exhibition space and class rooms completely from scratch. Frank, the vet, had used the stables for sick animals and had stalls in there which I knocked down. It had an earth floor which we concreted. On the art courses, it is the character of the place and the experience you give people that makes the weekend.

The pottery is an extension of me and I nearly joined it to the house, so that I could walk through from one to the other, but everyone said ‘no, no you’ll never leave’. Still, it’s nice to only walk five yards to work.

The builders did all the work at once and did some work on the house – mainly damp-proofing. We lived in the house while it was being done although Val was finishing a postgrad in London and was consulting in London so we were back and forth while the pottery was being constructed.

Did you do work to the kitchen?

Yes, we later made the kitchen bigger by knocking down walls and building an extension. This used to be divided into a kitchen and diningroom. It is amazing imagining a family of eight eating in there. We put in a Cash and Carry kitchen – cheap and cheerful.

We turned the kitchen around and it’s nice now to be able to look out of the window while you are doing the washing up.

During the weekend classes we bring the students into this kitchen and cook a three-course lunch so they get to socialise: people will remember the lunch more than the course.

The Aga was coal-fired and was converted to oil in the 1960s. We had it converted by Sorn Cookers (based in Thurles), which makes it a central heating boiler that also does the cooking. It cost €6,000 to take out the Aga, gut and convert it. It’s expensive but we were going to have to replace the boiler anyway. It’s on a timer now, like any central heating boiler, and we have saved about €1,500 a year on oil – now that it’s not on all the time. It’s a good solution if you’ve got an Aga and can’t bear to part with it.

Did you bring your furniture from your last house, or buy it here?

Most of the furniture came with us. I bought a 1930s cupboard in London: it came from a house in Hampstead. It looks out of place here but I love it.

The oak chairs were bought in a shop in Crouch End for a couple of hundred pounds. The shelves are an old church vestry which I bought in Sheffield in England when I was at university.

You have a lot of pottery

I do love being surrounded by art objects. Often it’s a picture that makes a room – the atmosphere is built around art which, for someone who spent all their life in an office, is wonderful.

My uncle was a potter and I have a lot of his pots around. He was very into Japanese Buddhism and the style of Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada who were two key people in the pottery scene.

Traditional heavy pottery used to be so popular but now things are much more slick, more minimal and often people will just place one pot in the middle of the table. My uncle instilled in me the philosophy that a potter will put creative energy into their pieces which the person buying it receives. If a pot is dug up 100 years after it was made that creative energy is still there. Clay is boring, I tell my classes, you add the creativity.

I love buying well known potters’ work and have pieces around the house. It’s also nice to put money into the hands of people you know.

In Ireland it’s a thing, knowing the artist, knowing about the person who made the thing you have bought.

Cormac Boydell is an amazing potter and I have a piece by Julian Smith, who is Scottish, on the wall. I have a set of pots by Sara Flynn and a picture of Roberts Cove by porcelain artist Sara Roberts, I really like her work.

For years craft has been a dirty word and design has become big. So some pottery companies have gone bust because they couldn’t afford the labour cost, because people were buying in from Spain and China. But in a very interesting move, in the recession people want to buy an original hand-made Irish piece and now value craft.

Everyone has a favourite mug shape and yet when they go and buy a mug they get plain flat things.

My own work tends to be sculptural, drawing on a love of form and texture. I want to break down the barriers between traditional craft skills and the apparent inaccessibility of fine art. People ask if my teapots work, but I wouldn’t sell them if they didn’t, yet people say they couldn’t possibly use one.

Is the interior here different to your home in London?

In London – where we would have had dinner parties – I would have concentrated on all of the finishing touches in an interior, including matching William Morris wallpaper to everything. But out here we spend the whole time repairing the roof or doing outdoor work and decided not to be so fussy. Things would benefit from work but we are relaxed about it. This house is higgledy-piggledy and not all in the one style. The main thing here is the view.

Brown Thomas Cork Design Week runs until May 24th. It includes work by 15 designers in ceramics, glass, wood sculpture and furniture design and their work is displayed on the second floor