Hospitality Design - October 2012 - 36

2. Clodagh and son Tim, working on a fashion collection.

3. Models on the steps of Clodagh’s couture house in Dublin.

rst fashion show, publicity poured in. Soon I was exporting all over the world with a private clientele of glamorous people. I licensed my design to several manufacturers and promoted Irish tweeds, knits, and linens. I lived in a Georgian farmhouse with a stone walled garden and worked in a Georgian townhouse. I married an Irishman and had three boys. I loved cooking and entertaining and driving my fast sports car, having a morning ride on the way to the studio a er the children were dropped o at school. But some things in my life were not working out, and in the seventies I gave my last fashion show (I was not happy: all black, even the bride’s dress; it was a precursor of the a ire I would adopt in New York). I changed husbands, countries, and careers, and went to Almeria in Spain. At the foot of the Sierra Alhamilla range we had a farmhouse without electricity or water; orange and palm tree terraces stepped down to a dirt road. We bought two Arabian horses and two Irish se ers, an ancient Land Rover and a younger Citroën. Barren ochre and red earth; the cadence of Federico García Lorca and cante hondo; the swirl and color

of amenco; the scent of orange blossom and jasmine and viscous green olive oil— it was such a joy. Living by the Mediterranean was a radical change a er the so mists, lilting voices, and verdant elds of the Irish landscape. Three hundred sixty days a year of sun; solar power and energy from the prevailing winds. I started wrestling with a townhouse we had bought in an eighteenth-century square. It was a rabbit warren of cubicles and bad partitions. I fought with the architect and somehow got my way. On the day of demolition the sun streamed in and caught the dust motes and the fourteen-foot shu ers opened to sparrows and plane trees and the laughter of children in the square. REVELATION! I opened a design studio and hired an architect who worked with solar and wind energy and launched my new career. A man showed up on my doorstep the day I hung out my shingle and asked if I would design his English pub. I told him ‘I am Irish!’ He thought it was close enough, and invited me to start work the next day. With dictionary in hand and fear in my heart, I did just that. He was cute, and I was watching him rather than where I was walking, so I fell over the rubble,

broke my leg, and completed my rst project on crutches. (How can it be that my careers started with broken bones?) I was o ! I worked on hospitality, corporate vacation homes, and even opened a very unsuccessful store to sell the arts and cra s I collected from the gypsies and found in the pueblos. For seven years I roamed Spain and Morocco in the Land Rover we named Dulcinea. We needed to expand our horizons, so we moved to New York, which is still in my view the balsamic reduction of the world: a necklace of villages, a Babel of languages, a bu et of art, music, and food, with that giant emerald, Central Park, stuck in the middle. A few days a er we arrived, I was walking down Madison Avenue and ran into a photographer-cum-adman who had photographed my townhouse for a poster called the Doors of Dublin. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. When I told him, he said, ‘Design my apartment for me— and my o ce.’ ‘But you haven’t seen my work.’ ‘I have been in your house in Dublin. That’s enough for me.’ Without breaking a bone, I had launched my New York design career. hd

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