Three colours are key to Suzie McAdam’s Sandycove home, a two-storey, double-fronted, four-bedroom early Victorian house with the interior designer’s signature style stitched into every aspect. Three colours: blue, pink and green, from the exquisite stained-glass flowers and butterflies in the fanlight and the side panels of the sky-hued door, through tall glass doors to the green of the garden and beyond to the sea, where sails flutter and the Baily light blinks on Howth Head.
A fireplace in the hall of number 3 Hastings Terrace is a reminder of the original house McAdam and her husband, Barry Byrne, bought in 2015, for €1.071 million, and lived in for some time while reimagining the layout and working through the planning process. They engaged architect Courtney McDonnell, whose comprehensive redesign involved demolishing and replacing the original return – the house is not listed – moving the stairs, digging out the ground floor and rejigging the accommodation to put the bedrooms downstairs and the living space upstairs.
She and McDonnell – friends since their Limerick childhood and classmates in Bolton Street for three years until McAdam moved from architecture to interiors – put great thought into every aspect of the house, which covers 240sq m (2,583sq ft) and is located at the end of a short terrace on Sandycove Road, between Marine Avenue and Burdett Avenue.
“We moved in at Christmas 2019,” says McAdam, “thinking this was our forever home”. Their plans for grand entertaining were upended by the pandemic, during which their garden and their family grew; they were so lucky, she says, being able to spend lockdowns so close to the sea.
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She has worked on interiors for a lot of private clients in the locality, to which she feels very attached: “It’s a lovely community, the houses aren’t set back behind big gates and it’s a few minutes from the shops in Glasthule”; it’s also close to the Dart, to lots of schools and shoreline amenities. With that in mind, they have bought and started work on another house close by – “I thought I was done,” says McAdam, “but I love the design challenge of a renovation” – and are putting number 3 on the market through the Bergin agency with an asking price of €2.5 million.
The redbrick house, built in 1860, has a pea-gravelled garden with off-street parking and cottagey planting around the perimeter. The drama begins inside the new sash windows, with reflected light from the redbrick houses across the road on Brighton Terrace casting a pinky glow through the fanlight on to the patterned floor tiles that are dotted and edged with pink, green and blue. The new staircase by McNally Joinery, with blue powder-coated metal spindles and a wooden handrail, rises from the left, past tucked-away storage, into a new void.
The main bedroom suite to the right is a McAdam showcase, with flamboyant touches anchored by attention to detail and perfect proportions, and everything from vintage light fittings to brushed brass switches earning their considered place. The pink en-suite bathroom, familiar from social media and magazines, is quite the wow in real life, with Art Deco influences, a wall of pink onyx from Miller Bros, panels of linen wallpaper, and a one-tonne marble bath from TileStyle. To support this, and to facilitate underfloor heating, they dug out tonnes of granite – which they reused in garden walls – and sat the house on a bed of poured concrete. On the other side of this is a walk-in wardrobe, dressed with the added drama of castellated crinoline curtains.
Across the hall is a child’s bedroom with a sweet en suite, all in hues of blues and greens. The third and fourth bedrooms are down a wooden step, both painted Card Room Green – one of the designer’s staple colours for restaurants – that emphasises the link to the garden from glass double doors. There is a another beautiful bathroom here, wallpapered in La Scala scenery; beyond this a utility cupboard, fronted by navy glass doors, is another of McAdam’s stylish storage solutions, right beside the garden doors for outside clothes-drying.
The garden design by Digby Brady serves to make it feel much bigger than before, she says, with a planting scheme similar to that out the front, and there is a square of artificial grass for easier management of small-boy and big-dog feet. Although it faces north, it traps light for much of the day and there is a pedestrian gate to the rear lane.
Back inside, sunbeams pour down the stairwell through a skylight, and on the last turn a window frames the sea view in what proves an ingenious touch. It lines up perfectly with a slot in the Juliet balcony, off which is McAdam’s “mermaid bathroom” tiled in lilac glass tail-scales; and it matches a window panel in the diningroom’s built-in bar, so you can count the sails in the bay while mixing your drink.
The diningroom, with a window to the front, is papered in a Watts of Westminster pattern of peonies and ducks, with chairs bought for a bargain at a Buckley’s auction recovered and sitting smartly around the long table. The squared-off ope that divides this room from the formal livingroom is edged in brass – “a contemporary intervention, a sort of portal”, says McAdam.
In an echo of her time as a judge on RTÉ’s Home of the Year TV programme, she indicates her favourite spot in the house: at the piano by the middle window, over the front door; this room epitomises luxury, with a fine fireplace and panelling added to frame their artworks.
The house, with a well-insulated Ber of B3, is a pleasing blend of old and new, with lovely proportions, seven original fireplaces and delicate ceiling centrepieces fitting easily with light fittings by designers such as Ingo Maurer, a Sonos surround-sound system and Versailles panel flooring. The custom-blue stove by La Cornue in the kitchen sets off the island of sealed and treated Calacatta marble, as well as the brass fittings and the joinery by Newcastle Design.
The room is lit from above and from the stairwell, and at the living/dining end, where long low benches double up as storage, there’s a full-width window detailed to draw the eye out over green gardens to the pink sky, above a blue sea.
