Asked about the paint colour in a bedroom at 42 Synge Street, one of the owners, printmaker and fabric designer Michele Sweetman, says: “I mixed it myself from pots of paint I had.” She says it as if it were perfectly natural to come up with something so sublime from odds and ends.
The cool ice-cream colours in the three top-floor bedrooms work well with the period features – including marble fireplaces, decorative plasterwork, sash windows with shutters and wooden floors – of this Victorian-era, Georgian-style three- storey house in a street that has just bade farewell to its last bedsits: it’s all family homes opposite the church and school now.
Sweetman gradually did up the 230sq m (2,475sq ft) house – for sale at €950,000 through Sherry FitzGerald – over her 20-odd years here, working in sympathy with the structure but doing so with flair.
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Some of the paint colours are even off the peg, such as the gentle taupe from Zoffany in the huge, dual-aspect living room on the raised ground floor (the house is reached via stone steps), with its wooden floors and original Kilkenny marble fireplaces.
Stairs through the house have been painted in Farrow and Ball white floor paint.
An extension designed by her brother-in-law Sam Stephenson was one of the last structures he created (it was finished by a former colleague after Stephenson died).
This incorporates a studio for Sweetman and a conservatory off the kitchen, opening to an east-facing garden which is paved and has a south-facing raised bed.
The kitchen has wooden units, stone tiled floors and centres on a Stanley range.
Wet room Beside this, to the front of the house, is a playroom/sitting room with wet room beyond it beneath the entrance steps (in the former coal hole).
One wall is in white, brick-shaped tiles – reminiscent of the London Underground – which are repeated in elements of other bathrooms and the kitchen.
There is also a wet room beside a bedroom/studio on the hall return.
A bathroom on the top floor – where two bedrooms were divided into three – was created by Sweetman’s cousin Amanda Hogan, who at the time ran interiors company Scudding Clouds (and is now designing in London).
This has art deco-style walls of mirrors and a large bath built from variegated brown tiles.
Next year the house will form part of the backdrop to a film with the working title Sing Street, filmed on the road recently, by the director and writer of Once John Carney, who went to the school across the road in the 1980s.
After all her work on the house and the vibrancy of the neighbourhood, Sweetman says she will be sorry to leave.
