Interior design: Designed to win
A passion for seeking out quirky items and a sense of style inherited from her mother have combined to help award-winning interior designer Danielle MacInnes on her path to success, writes Jacqueline Kavanagh
In Danielle's own house - a 1910, two-bed, ex-council house, pictured here - you can see why the designer has attracted so much attention. Her quirky and eclectic choice of furniture and colour proves that standing out from the crowd certainly gets you noticed. The house is a testament to her individuality
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Friday June 06 2008
When the American fashion designer Bill Blass said, "Style is primarily a matter of instinct", he might well have had someone like Danielle Mac Innes in mind.
Within the space of the past year, Danielle has set up Fuse Interiors, has been invited to join the board of The Interiors Association of Ireland and has won Best Newcomer at the recent Interior Design Awards. And while a lot of her success can be attributed to hard graft, there's no denying her creative spirit and style might be something she inherited.
"While I was young, we moved about 10 times," says Danielle. "My parents are serial renovators. They'd buy a period house that needed a lot of work, extend and modernise it. My mum has a real eye for design. I guess it's in my blood."
Despite dreams of attending art college, Danielle studied for a masters in Social and Organisational Psychology at Queens, then travelled and it was during this time her aspirations to work creatively were rekindled.
She returned home and worked with her mother Marion to renovate a town house and soon found she'd a natural talent for interior design. Danielle is not convinced you can be taught how to be a successful designer, but she completed an HND in Interior Design at the Dublin Institute of Design.
"You can teach people how to put mood boards together and how to present stuff, but I don't know if design is something you can be taught," she says.
It's in Danielle's own house that you can best see why the designer has attracted so much attention. Her quirky and eclectic choice of furniture and colour proves that standing out from the crowd certainly gets you noticed.
"I'm probably not that conventional," says the fan of mid-century design, Bauhaus and Pop Art's Warhol and Lichtenstein. "I'm attracted to things that are a bit quirky or different."
Danielle bought her 1910, two-bedroom, ex-council house two years ago and has created a testament to individuality. She says it was the windows that first caught her attention.
Originality
"It has the original sash windows, and that sold me straightaway. The windows on a lot of the houses on the street are gone and have been replaced with PVC windows, which I hate. And the house itself is actually really cute -- upstairs the ceiling goes up into the eaves, so it has a cottage feel to it."
She knocked down the old kitchen and extended the house from its original 73sqm to 125sqm, adding a second living area, a kitchen with a glass back wall and a bathroom downstairs. Upstairs, she created a third bedroom and two bathrooms.
Despite the age of the property she doesn't feel constrained by traditional design parameters -- an example is the stylish glass-sided staircase, which she designed herself.
"People think because it's a period house you have to go with traditional stuff, but contemporary design works really well in a period house."
And while some might baulk at using a grey or lime, she feels it's how you combine colours that creates the magic.
"Colours are very dependent on the other colours they're set with and the light they're presented in," says Danielle, who believes her knowledge of psychology and the psychological effects of light, colour and space help create her interiors.
And it's clear that it's her persistence to achieve an original look that has ensured she's created a one-off. "You need to seek out places not everyone is going to visit," she says. "Just like fashion, if you were looking for something unusual, you'd go looking in boutiques."
And she clearly practises what she preaches. In the living room there's a €95 sideboard from Oxfam. The white mirror in her living room is from Touch-Wood on the South Circular Road in Dublin, and she also boasts pieces from Alfies Antique Market in London and artwork from Orla Walsh. She's not afraid, however, of mixing her treasure finds with pieces from Habitat and Heal's of London, and Charles Eames chairs.
"Buy expensive things when you can and offset them with cheaper things -- I have a pod chair from Ikea and the cushion is from the Designers Guild. But if you look at something and think maybe it's a little bit cheap, then it looks cheap." She admits that not everyone agrees with her choices. "I've some mid-century sideboards that my dad just doesn't get, and so far as he's concerned they should go on the skip. If you were around for that stuff the first time around, you'd probably hate it," she laughs.
Danielle's clients are property developers, architect firms and residential clients. She believes it's important for clients to discover their own style.
"People don't want their friends to walk in and say, 'Wow, who is your designer?' They want people to walk in and say, 'Wow, you've got great taste!' It should look like stuff they've collected over the years. When we are away, I always buy something for the house. I think it's nice for things to have a story."
Danielle admits she'd love to have the opportunity to create the interiors for a boutique hotel. Until then, she's going to let her instinct lead the way.
Fuse Interiors, 01 6611498, www.fuseinteriors.ie
- Jacqueline Kavanagh
