Riverfront home now has a better flow

Bill Hughes is a film producer and presents 4 on Broadwayon 4FM each Thursday. He tells EMMA CULLINANabout life in an apartment on the Liffey

When did you move here?

Gary and I have been here since November 1998. This was one of the first apartment buildings here. The army was still in the barracks next to us and the pub on our doorstep had just closed and remains shut. Now they are developing the army barracks land so, after sitting here all alone, we are now becoming part of a waterfront development.

What attracted you to this apartment?

Living on the river. Gary saw the potential before I did. I had been living in a big three-storey 1830s William IV house on Haddington Road but I could never park, never unload the shopping safely because it was a busy road, and friends who came to visit couldn’t park. It was just crazy. It was a gorgeous house. I spent three years there but, just at the time I met Gary, I had made the decision to sell. I was rattling around in it. It had been a romantic notion to want a big house.

It was a foolish house, it was for other people. I wasn’t doing it for me and I thought: ‘Who am I impressing?’ I wasn’t impressing myself, it was tiring and I got out.

Did you have to do much to the apartment?

We were the first people in here and it had concrete floors (which we replaced with oak and Kilkenny stone), pine ceilings and hideous décor.

There were small doors, which we made bigger, and lots of rooms, including three rooms in this kitchen/dining/sitting room. Where the dining area is now there was a bedroom with a pine ceiling whose rooflights could not reach the livingroom next door, as they do now, and there was a very dark corner in the livingroom.

This apartment takes up a big roof space which had not been fully utilised, so we went to town and knocked it all through. It is amazing to have a big space like this in an apartment in Dublin.

I have a great friend, the architect Derek Tynan, who had done my house on Haddington Road which had been a school so had no kitchen or bathroom, just functioning toilets and classrooms.

When he came to view the apartment, it took Derek about five minutes to sort everything. He said: ‘If I move this wall, and move this. . .’ and I could immediately visualise it. The work took quite a while because there was so much construction work but luckily, having sold the house, I was able to live there for five months.

Was it odd buying somewhere and then ripping it apart?

You could see that it needed help: ‘Dear friend, this is why I am not selling, I am looking tired.’ It had been on the market for a while so I ended up getting it for a really good price: the developer was very happy to let me take it off his hands.

Where did you get your furniture?

It’s eclectic at the moment. The dining table has come with me from a few places. I am the guardian angel of this table, on behalf of my brother and his wife.

I love the table and friends love sitting around it being well fed and well watered.

I have had this big blue couch for a while and another standard couch but I decided to change recently and have more modern furniture so I have a big, mad white leather couch which is an experiment.

It was part of a set for a TV show that was cancelled and they said, ‘get rid of the set’, so I brought part of the set home.

We have a Lutyens bench out on the balcony and a gnome coffee table by Philippe Starck which came from a very special couple of friends who are über-style kings and, in giving it to us, they as much took the mickey out of themselves while also knowing that we were cheeky enough to use it.

The red armchair is normally in my bedroom but it is my most comfortable chair for watching TV and we have recently watched more TV than usual – and now Wimbledon has started – so I brought the chair out here.

Derek Tynan designed the unit along one wall of the diningroom which is full of CDs: the amount of music it can hold is great.

The soft old dining chairs came with the table although I had them fixed and resprung: it is nice being comfortable while sitting at the table for hours. I love having people around to dinner: we used to have drinks parties but it’s not worth it, people don’t look after other people’s places as well as they used to – you can see where someone put their feet up against the wall, that drives me crazy.

The dining table very comfortably seats eight and can squeeze in 10 so the roof is raised. The other night we gathered people to watch a show I had done. I said to friends: ‘I’m going to do a bowl of spaghetti, mixed salad and garlic bread, are you up for it?’ and they all said yes.

It’s a good space that works well, especially with the galley kitchen being part of the room. You can hear everything; even things you don’t want to hear.

And you collect art...

I did a film on Anne Madden and have a piece from her Garden of Love series. The Patrick Scott beside it is an original and the Scott on the other wall is a lithograph that I got later.

Paul Colreavy from Sligo is a great fan of Anne Madden and, when he saw my film on her, he asked me to open his exhibition: I really liked his stuff and bought a piece. I love the picture by Eithne Jordan of a big man smoking and I also have pieces by Colin Davidson and Mike Fitzharris; I have three of his. I bought a Keith Haring picture in San Francisco about 10 years ago in a designated Keith Haring gallery, because there the funds from his work go to AIDS charities.

How do you choose pictures?

By what I can live with. I went through a period where I had very classic type paintings but then, as I got older, my taste became more eclectic and I was able to handle abstract better, particularly where modern Irish painting was going.

Do you have white walls as a backdrop to the paintings?

When I first came here the walls were very different. I had different walls in deep raspberry, plum and alabaster.

It worked very well for a while but then I felt I was living in a bordello. It was at the time I changed from having more classic pictures: I sold the old ones at auction and the artists weren’t at all happy about that. The art perks me up in evening when I come home and it perks me up in the morning when I come out for coffee.

You have a great view over the river...

We have two balconies and it’s lovely to watch the sun rise over the obelisk in the Phoenix Park: it can be really dazzling so you have to wear sunglasses while sitting wrapped in a blanket with a steaming cup of coffee.

In early July the salmon start coming up the river to spawn. They were coming up in such massive numbers until the nearby Calatrava bridge was on site and I didn’t see any for two years but there were a few last year. When they came up, the river would turn silver with their bellies rolling, rolling, rolling – it was so funny to see that.

You see the odd seal swimming by. One night I was watching a duck leading out her six ducklings until my partner pointed out that a seal on other side of the river was throwing pollock into the air.

We get visited by cormorants, cranes, swans, Canadian geese, water hens and various wild fowl that I can’t identify. There’s tremendous bird life on the river.

I just love it here because it is slightly out of the way but you can walk to O’Connell Bridge comfortably in half an hour and, when people walk in the Phoenix Park and the War Memorial Gardens in summer, they check to see if we’re in and have a cup of tea.

This is the longest I have ever lived in any one place and the happiest place I’ve ever been in – and it has tied in with the longest relationship I’ve ever been in.

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