This 1980s Sligo bungalow is unrecognisable thanks to its artist owner's considered designs

IMAGE Interiors & LivingRemodelling a 1980s bungalow gave artist Cléa van der Grijn a chance to realise her dreams, and create space for her art to breathe, writes Gemma Tipton., contemplating the light-filled home she designed on an expansive site at Rosses Point in Sligo.

The antique carousel horse came from Cléa’s mother. The photograph on the wall is a still from her Reconstructing Memory exhibition. The church bench is from a salvage yard in Drumcliff. “It was important to me that every single material in the house would never have to be looked after,” Cléa explains. “Everything is either natural wood, metal, concrete or wax plaster. There are no skirting boards, no paint to be redone. Everything will, I hope, only grow more lovely with age. Nothing is pretty or ornamental in the build, everything has a function, but for me it is beautiful.

The house has been a labour of love, but perhaps it was also in the blood. “I was brought up with my father always buying houses, in Amsterdam or Ireland, doing them up from scratch. He’d sell them for profit and live for a year on the money, making his paintings, which he would then sell,” Cléa remembers. “I would have loved to have been an architect,” she continues. “But the thing about doing something you don’t usually do is that you can say: ‘I think this is gorgeous’.

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