This was truly a dream project for us with dream clients who truly embrace design, luxury, art and experience, through and through. Dan and Linda Kiely epitomise style, exuberance, fun and flamboyance with a true love of fashion, art, design, travel and style. This project was for them a celebration of all of these aspects and a place to play when spending time in Dublin with friends. It is a secondary home for the couple so as such, they saw it as an opportunity to be bold, playful and expressive throughout. The project was all about creating an exceptional atmosphere, an environment for hosting soirees, parties and business gatherings, with more emphasis on the bar, luxury hospitality feel than that of a primary home. For us as designers, it was a chance to play, the bolder the better, looking at it more as a high end cocktail bar or members club than a family home.

The brief was to completely turn the existing apartment on its head, both in layout and configuration and in aesthetic and feel. Dan asked for something no one else in Dublin had, a desirable destination that he could look forward to visiting, a place he wanted to meet friends in, a deliberate contrast from his calm home outside Dublin. He wanted art and design at the epicentre and asked us to source internationally to create a collection of diverse and talented art, design and craft that would look and feel at home in any international destination. There was to be nothing safe about it, nothing neutral. Functionality was of course a massive consideration but we were tasked to factor functionality in so that it was so well considered, it became invisible. What the eye was to see was only beauty, detail, opulence and luxury.