A refurbished Dalkey period house is also a showroom for an impressive collection of 20th-century design classics - all for sale.
It can be sad to see an old house that has seen better days: plaster walls buckling, mouldings suffocating under decades of paint, gardens in need of a machete. Janie Lazar, a London-born furniture retailer, and her husband Peter Cully, an architect, bought just such a house in Dalkey, Co Dublin.
The original 19th-century house is no masterpiece architecturally, but it's blessed with panoramic views of Dublin Bay on one side and the old Dalkey quarry on the other. It also has a pretty exterior, and original features galore. Behind the front door, rooms that once seemed grim are now filled with light.
"We gutted it from top to bottom - at one point you could look right up through the roof from the ground floor," Lazar says.
When the couple first returned to Dublin after a long period living in London, she set up a marketing business. But, five years later, it was time for a change. "I'd always worked with gardens in an informal way, and started taking commissions."
The garden that winds around the house is small, but imaginative. At the front are two seating areas; at the back a shaded space filled with ferns and floored with a mix of gravel and brick. Wooden crates and metal bins have been given second lives as plant containers. "You don't need to spend a lot on a garden. Planting here is unstructured so it doesn't feel "designed". Things look as if they've sprung up naturally." A seaside vibe has been added with shells scattered haphazardly around the edges of flowerbeds. "I drove Cavistons mad asking for them."
Lazar's next career change came about when she wanted to buy a reproduction of Eileen Gray's Bibendum chair. "It was a lot harder than I thought to find a good-quality version at a good price." So she did a little research, one thing led to another, and she started importing furniture by 20th-century designers such as Gray, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer. Her company is called Design Classics Direct, and the furniture is delivered straight to the customer's door. Reproductions vary, but Lazar has found the best ones by visiting factories in Italy.
"We operate without a shop . . . We're an independent company, sourcing from different suppliers and manufacturers - everything is made to order." Customers can make an appointment to visit the house and judge the quality for themselves.
The thing about buying a lot of this type of furniture is that the home - or rather, the collection - looks fantastic. But what happens when you just want to stay in and be comfortable? Lazar takes the approach that classic modern furniture can be mixed with anything. "My philosophy is that a house changes with you, that we need sentimental objects that represent different parts of our lives."
• www.designclassicsdirect.ie, 086-8279660