On Leaving and Starting Again

A little over a year ago, I moved my whole life from Portugal to a corner of Ireland I barely knew. Not for a holiday, not for a season - properly, with everything that comes with it. New house, new roads, new way the rain sounds on a roof. It is one thing to admire a place as a visitor. It is another thing entirely to try to build a business, and a home, and a life for your family somewhere you have no history yet.

I will admit the first months were less about design and more about simply learning how a place works. Where things are. How people here actually talk to each other, and how long it takes before you are not "the new person" anymore. There is no shortcut through that. You just do the slow work of showing up, again and again, until a place starts to feel less borrowed.

What I did not expect was how much that experience would sharpen my eye as a designer. When you arrive somewhere with no inherited assumptions about how a room should look, you notice things a lifelong local might walk straight past. The particular grey of Clare stone. The way certain houses here are built to hold heat against a damp climate rather than to look a certain way. I was not defending old habits from somewhere else. I was genuinely looking, the way you look at something for the first time.

I think that is part of what I try to bring to every client now, whether they have lived in their house for twenty years or moved in last month. A willingness to actually look at a space fresh, rather than assume you already know what it needs. Starting again, in a new country, taught me that the most useful thing you can bring into an unfamiliar room is not expertise. It is attention.