A big, fat teapot is likely to inspire in most of us nothing more than the wish for a nice cup of tea. Jewellery designer Inga Reed is different: when she sees a teapot, her creative juices really get going, and there are lots of teapots in her home in Co Kilkenny. That's partly because her husband, Les, trained as a ceramicist, and together they've built up quite a ceramics collection. But, intriguingly, ceramics are also one of her chief sources of inspiration.

"There's one particular designer, Wally Keeler, who's English and I have a teapot of his which makes me so happy. I love its roundness and the soft glaze like butter," Inga says. "If I need to re-charge my batteries, I pick up a piece of his. I get more joy out of a pot than I do out of a piece of jewellery."

Fortunately for Inga, there are other people who prefer to get their pleasure out of jewellery and out of her designs -- made of silver, gold and precious and semi-precious stones -- in particular; recent laurels include the inaugural Crafts Council of Ireland Craftsmanship Award 2008. It's especially nice to be still getting awards, seeing as Inga has been designing jewellery since she graduated from art college in the mid Seventies. And the jewellery-design seed had been planted long before that again. "I used to go on holidays all over the coast with my Dad, and I remember being in Barleycove in West Cork when I was seven or eight, collecting shells and boring holes in them with screwdrivers, threading shoe laces through them. I still have some of those necklaces to prove it," Inga laughs.

At that age, Inga had only just come to live in Ireland. Originally from Liverpool, she was the second oldest in a family of five who moved to Belfast when her father got a job as senior lecturer in psychology in Queens. After school, Inga did one year in art college in Belfast before transferring to Loughborough in England to study jewellery design and silversmithing. She was, she says, "also lucky enough" to meet her future husband, Les, there.

"We decided," she recalls, "that whoever got the first job, no matter where it was, the other would follow. Les, who is English, got the first offer, in the ceramics department in the Crawford College of Art in Cork, so off we went."

They spent 13 years in Cork, in Bandon, where, in between looking after her three boys, Christopher, Timothy and Mark, now aged 24 down to 19, Inga did one-off pieces and took part in the odd exhibition.

However, it was when they moved to Kilkenny in 1990 -- again, a case of following where Les led: he had begun to work with the Crafts Council, which is based there -- that Inga began to develop her own range. She has been designing jewellery "absolutely full time" for the last 12 years. Her designs are wide ranging: she can do anything from a little pair of pearl earrings priced at €50 to one-off exhibition pieces which can cost anything up to €50,000. The latter she does for SOFA, a big annual fair in Chicago, while she sells her more regular pieces through Designyard on Nassau Street, in Dublin.

These include silver and gold pieces made up with semi-precious stones such as onyx, coral and jasper. She's particularly fond of the range of colours and patterns jasper comes in -- the brick-red jasper, the spotted-dalmation jasper, and Picasso jasper, which is like different coloured plasticines marbled together.

It's probably more than a coincidence that Inga went at the jewellery design full time at exactly the same time she incorporated a light-filled workshop in the new home she and Les built five miles outside Kilkenny.

When they moved to the town, they lived right in the thick of things, in a flat opposite the castle, but after five years there, they decided to look for a site on which to build.

"The trendy areas are Bennettsbridge, Thomastown. Where we are, in the north of Kilkenny, it's social Siberia." Inga laughs adding: "But it's beautiful. It was advertised as a dream site for a dream home and I remember first driving out to look at it. It was a beautiful November morning and there was this teardrop-shaped plot surrounded by trees with a river running at the bottom. I remember neither of us was looking at the other, in case the other didn't like it, but we both did." It was the river which secured them the site. "There were lots looking, but many of them had babies and the river would have been difficult to rope off."

There were the ruins of an old cottage on the site and, while they had to build from scratch, they also wanted their design to fit in as the cottage had done. They wanted a house that was relatively modern, making the most of available light, but which wouldn't stand out like "so many of the other sore thumbs". They were also constrained by budget.

Luckily Inga's brother, Mark White, an architect, was able to provide the ideal compromise -- a house which is split-level with a lot of glass, all south-facing and yet, it's a house that prompts people to ask whether it's an old house that was renovated.

"It's interesting on the inside rather than thrilling outside," says Inga. Features include a big kitchen and a big, double-height sitting room with a mezzanine, which houses their books.

There are four bedrooms and three bathrooms for "the lads".

When it comes Inga's interior design philosophy, it's fair to say pragmatism is the lynchpin.

"At the time we were building the house, Les was commuting to Dublin, I was project managing and it was too much time and effort for me to have a design statement," Inga says. "I couldn't spend six months deciding on a tap so I decided to keep everything simple."

She did have a few no-nos, though, one of which was no overhead cupboards in the kitchen.

"I don't like overhead cupboards so our solution was a walk-in pantry," Inga explains. "A friend who came to see us couldn't understand how she kept seeing the children walking into the kitchen, disappearing out of sight, and then emerging munching. Everything is kept in the pantry."

Inga did, however, decide on having lots of colour.

"Before, I used to have everything white. Now, I joke, it's 40 shades of green. We do have a lot of green."

And blue, and terracotta. All of which goes very well with the slate flooring, as do the many paintings and prints by artists including Carmel Benson and Jo Kelly. And, like many artists and designers, Inga has been known to barter and get works of art by swopping jewellery for, say, a picture.

"Gosh yes, I do swops. Which reminds me, I think I owe someone earrings."

So, if a particularly expensive work of art appeals, out comes the teapot -- for inspiration of course.

See www.ingareed.com