Ad Man Glamour

Originally published in Image Interiors & Living in January of this year, this Sandymount house tour, styled by Sheenagh Green and shot by Mark Scott, has taken on a new relevance. It's the home of mid-century furniture collector Geoff Kirk, who swears by Scandinavia as a source of much of his great collection of furniture, lighting and tabletop objects. For a slice of Nordic decor in Dublin, read on...

Maritime Museum of Denmark

Exhibition space buried underground and wrapping around a dry dock, a bridge leading you to Hamlet's castle housing an auditorium underneath and granite seating looping round a new public space, tapping out a message in morse code: I wasn't long in Denmark before I made a trip to the Maritime Museum of Denmark in Helsingør, and from first sight I was hooked. Opened in late 2013, the competition to design M/S Museet for Søfart, as it's known here, was won by Bjarke Ingels Group with a clever approach to a very restrictive brief. The museum was to be housed in a 60 year-old dry dock sandwiched between Helsingør's new cultural centre and Kronborg Castle, a UNESCO heritage site most famous for being the setting for Shakespeare's Hamlet. The museum would need to make an impression and create its own presence... without disrupting anyone's view of Kronborg. BIG achieved this by putting the museum not in the dry dock but buried on either side of it, using the dock itself as a public space intersected by three bridges: one that leads you to the castle (containing the museum's auditorium) and two that zigzag towards the museum's entrance. The design of the museum is incredibly impressive in that it successfully hides and reveals the museum simultaneously, while carving out a unique urban space in the process.

Back in DK

It's taken a few years, and a few locations in between, but I've finally returned to Denmark! I lived in Denmark's second city, Århus, back in the summers of 2008 and 2009, and it's there that I Like Local began as a sort of personal blog/design blog hybrid. It was a way for me to share the design and architecture I was encountering day to day, and in the six years I've been writing it since, it's always been populated with my finds as I've travelled from city to city. Before I start (re)discovering design and architecture here in Copenhagen, I thought it would be good to share some of those posts from the early days below, and you can read all of my Danish posts here. Enjoy, or as they say here (I think, my Danish is pretty ropey...) nyd!

Framing Family Life

The last of my 'so long London' posts is my most recent piece for Image Interiors & Living, a house tour in London's Islington, styled by Amanda Cochrane and shot by Tim Young. Read on...

'I'm all about framing moments' says Dublin-born Irenie Cossey as she reaches for a piece of artwork by her youngest daughter, Clara. It is a box frame displaying two dolls that Clara, aged six, made from paper and wool, sitting on a shelf surrounded by other colourful creations. As you look around the room you see a host of other keepsakes and mementos, and soon you realise that throughout this spacious north London home you can find ornaments and gifts, family hand-me-downs and children's artwork. Don't let the white walls and modernist furniture fool you: this is a house that treasures memories and perfectly frames the many moments of family life.

Lasdun in London

Denys Lasdun, born in 1914 and alive until 2001, is my favourite British architect (for now, at least, though I can't think of anyone likely to outdo him any time soon). Sometimes classed as a Brutalist for his big, bold, uncompromising buildings, his work is some of the most notable of the British modern movement and he is one of the most distinguished practitioners in the 20th century. I had never considered his work before moving to London, but his buildings there are some of my favourite in the city, so I thought a post about them would be an apt farewell to my former location before moving on to posting about Denmark.