Tag: chocolate factory

What a year 2018 has been…

2018 has been a wonderful year for Kingston Lafferty Design. We have had our challenges along the way, but who doesn’t? We can safely say that 2018 has been very kind to Kingston Lafferty Design.

In May we enjoyed the wonderful DFS Colour Happiness event when we transformed the Chocolate Factory for DFS. Hats off to Niamh O’Carroll for pulling all the pieces together. It was a full on week of adrenaline, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.

It was also great to represent at the House event in the RDS again, building a stand for Fleetwood Paints and also the Inspiration Stage. We were particularly proud of the Fleetwood stand, it was really a work of art, thanks to Moore O’Gorman for making it a reality and of course to Fleetwood paints, whose paint is second to none!

It was also an unprecedented year for awards and awards nominations. In July were thrilled to be longlisted for the inaugural Dezeen awards for our Urbana and Thérapie designs. In June we heard that we were nominated for best café at the Restaurant and Bar Design Awards for our beautiful Pot Bellied Pig in Rathmines. It was a long wait but, we were crowned winners in October at a fantastic event in London’s King’s Cross.

In the meantime, Róisín Lafferty, our founder and creative director only went and won Image Interiors & Living Interior Designer of the year for 2018. Congratulations Róisín, you’ve had a phenomenal year and thoroughly deserve the recognition.

Speaking of Image Interiors & Living, we were honoured to have our Bolton Coach House project feature as the cover story for the November/December issue of the magazine. This was one of our favourite projects to work on in 2018, working with old and new and bringing them together. We just heard in the week before Christmas that it was shortlisted for Irish Design Institute Awards 2018 in the Domestic Interior category.

As November rolled around so did the Fit Out Awards at the Convention Centre, we were delighted with our nomination for The Vaults Parlour, and even more delighted when our names were called out on the night as Fit Out Project of the year – Retail. Thanks too to our partners for this venture NSBS, we did celebrate the win in style.

On November 16 we celebrated our 1^st anniversary at KLD HQ with a celebration event. We invited Jill and Gill, John Redmond and Al Higgin’s to display work in our offices, while we also created a video installation in one of our rooms. We had live music, a trad session and people travelled from near and far to be here. There was also a maze of 50 trees for people to walk through to enter the building. We do like a bit of whimsy.

One of our major achievements of the year is getting CREATE by kld off the ground. CREATE by kld is a tailored design service from KLD, we provide the customer with the tools to transform their own homes. We were also very excited to open a Christmas Pop-Up in Foxrock Village for the weeks leading up to Christmas. We’re hoping 2019 will see CREATE by kld grow as we add e-commerce element to the site. If you haven’t heard of it yet, check it out here at createbykld.com

Here is a little video of 2018 at KLD:

Happy New Year to you all, wishing you health, happiness, imagination and creativity for 2019.

We recently spent a very exciting week transforming the amazing Chocolate Factory Warehouse space into a pop up Home of Colour for for DFS. The Chocolate Factory in Kings Inn Street in Dublin 1 is simply the most wonderful space in which to work. It has that old industrial feel, extraordinary light and beautiful rustic rafters. It is a designers dream.

We started put on a Monday morning with this wonderful blank canvas. Members of the team immediately began taping the flooring, zoning each area in which the furniture would be displayed. While the transformation took place within a week, there had of course been months of planning for the event by Niamh O’Carroll, DFS and KLD. A tremendous amount of time, thought and hard work went into the staging and meticulous execution of Home of Colour 2018.

Once the zoning and taping was done enter our joinery partners Moore & O’Gorman who built a cross-like partition in the middle of the space thus creating four distinct zones and a central focus. Once this structure was up, so began the painting marathon which would continue for two days. All hands were on deck as we lavished the woodwork with the wonderful paint from Fleetwood’s Prestige range.

And so after two long days of building and hanging and painting we were ready for the plants and more importantly the beautiful furniture all of which came from DFS.

We then had a photoshoot of the DFS Home of Colour with award winning photographer Barbara Corsico. You can see the beautiful and amazing images she created here. On the Thursday DFS and KLD hosted two events organised by O’Carroll Consulting. In the morning a select group of bloggers joined us in the DFS Home of Colour for a delicious champagne brunch with stunning food from Food Glorious Food, with prizes, goody bags, a discussion with Roisin and of course some early morning yoga. One lucky blogger won the stunning Marl Cuddler sofa from DFS. Our evening event which was cohosted with House and Home Magazine was open to the public had  “sleep over theme” and guest were treated to delicious pizza, popcorn, Prosecco and one lucky winner went home with the sofa of her dreams.

#Colourhappiness

And it wasn’t over yet as we had a visit from TV3’s Saturday AM on the Friday morning.

This was a wonderful week for KLD, transforming the Chocolate Factory for DFS Home of Colour.

Thank you to DFS for asking us to take part in this great project and to Niamh O’Carroll and Grainne Mooney of O’Carroll Consulting who worked tirelessly along with the KLD team made the whole week happen.

And sincerest thanks to all our collaborators and sponsors: Fleetwood Paints, Chocolate Factory and Green Shoes team, The National Gallery, White and Green, Food Glorious Food, Susan Hunter Lingerie, House and Home, Foxford, Wild Orchard, Gill and Jill.

We can safely say this is how we felt at the end of the week: