Designer Bill Simpson has successfully combined classic comfort andcontemporary style in his Sandymount home, writes Eoin Lyons.

There's something very appealing about a man who can spend his days devising colour schemes or choosing furniture and his nights cheering on a football team. Not that Bill Simpson doesn't have other passions, but the combination of hawk-eyed discernment about anything visual and more typical male pastimes, such as sport, go some way towards understanding him as a professional and as a person.

The design director at Brown Thomas for some 20 years, he recently set up business as an interior designer and now works with architectural firms such as Oppermann Associates and Traynor O'Toole Partnership, as well as his own projects.

Over coffee in the kitchen of the Sandymount home he shares with his wife, Lola, a fashion stylist, and their two teenage children, Simpson is the picture of a modern man. Dressed in a black sweater and grey jeans, he personifies urban cool but his manner is laid-back affability. Mercifully, he is neither a poseur nor a painfully earnest design obsessive, but equally willing to talk about music or his new career.

It's an attitude that makes sense when one considers Simpson's background. Born in Edinburgh, his family moved to Dublin when he was a child: "When I finished school I got an apprenticeship to be a designer with Donegal Carpets in what was the Sweepstakes building on Grafton Street and is now McDonalds. One day a guy who did the window displays in Switzer's came in to order something and I thought, 'I could do that'." This meant another apprenticeship on the store's merchandising team, where he learnt about retail from the inside out. He eventually became design director for the Brown Thomas group, a role that involved helping to create BT's identity through the appearance of the stores. "They were exciting times," he recalls. "I started out at the old BT store on Grafton Street and oversaw its transformation across the road. Back then the country was at the beginning of economic change and Brown Thomas was in a position to ride the crest when the good times came."

The decision to take a new direction in working life was simple. "I reached 50 last year and didn't want the same intense deadlines anymore." He's hardly had a radical slow down, however. Apart from domestic interior design projects, he is still involved in retail design.

Simpson has never been one to align himself too strongly with a particular style and the Sandymount house is a morphing of contemporary simplicity and New England warmth, with a little bit of Irish tradition to keep it grounded. Built in the 1980s and extended by the couple, the charm of the place comes from the fact that each room has a slightly different feel. Through their friend, florist James Baille, they discovered the house almost by chance. "He used to live next door. We went to a party at his house and loved it. The following week this house came up for sale."

The interior has developed over time, as family homes often do, and with the kind of easy approach in which he can rarely indulge professionally. The kitchen was designed by Simpson and built by a craftsman. "I used to be more into having things perfect, but when you've a family with teenagers, you learn to relax!"

Not intimidating in any way, it's the kind of place where nothing is so valuable that people are worried about using it. That said, there are numerous pieces that are relatively precious: for example, in the livingroom, a painting by Guggi hangs above a red couch. "When I first came to Ireland as a kid, I went to a youth club to meet people and Guggi was one of the first kids I came across. Over the years we got to know each other and I thought, when I have a few quid I must buy one of his paintings. When I eventually did, he came and hung it but we've argued over a pint whether or not it's straight."

Without the need for a formal diningroom, the couple extended to the rear and created a modern space, designed by Simpson, where a suspended stone-filled shelf has embedded uplighters and a recessed shelf above to hold CDs.

• His favourite chair, designed by George Nelson, sits at one end. "It's 50 years old, the same age as me but wearing a little better and, like me, it's a bit battered around the edges."

• Also in this room is an antique chest: "I bought it in what was Cooke's Antiques on Francis Street when I was a pauper - it cost a week's wages at the time but it's a beautiful thing."

• In the family room, a 1930s style leather chair, shipped from the US chain Pottery Barn, sits in front of a photo box that was a Christmas present from his son.

• On the upstairs landing hangs a photograph of footballer Pele. "I got it through BTs when he was in the store for a promotional event and he signed it. I met him when I was 14 (Scotland played Brazil in 1968) so I brought my own son, who was also 14, to meet him."

billsimpson@eircom.net