Helen James was exposed to art and design from a very early age, growing up in the grounds of the Chester Beatty Library in Shrewsbury Road, where her father was a curator of Islamic art. After her graduation in textiles from the National College of Art & Design, she headed to New York where she worked for 10 years with the designer Donna Karan. Back in Ireland in 2001, she launched a collection of scarves and belts, then returned to New York to work in homewares with Karan for a further period, and eventually settled in Castlepollard with her family in 2012. Following a year in Avoca working with Ivan Pratt in the weaving mills, she moved to Dunnes Stores as creative director of homewares, where she created its innovative Considered range of food and kitchenware and a cafe in 2014. She was a recent judge on the RTÉ series Home of the Year and will be expanding Considered into lighting, rugs and more furniture. She lives in Terenure with her husband and three sons.
Describe your interiors style
I think your interiors style should be dictated by the space you are in. I would be very influenced by the space I am working in and when I lived in a farmhouse in Westmeath there was stuff that worked there that would not work somewhere else. Now I have a 1920s house in Terenure, so the style there would be slightly more formal than Westmeath. The one thread is that I love textiles and think that textiles are so important for a home. I love my home to be collected – to have things that are old and have a patina, a story and a history.
Which room do you most enjoy and why?
I have to say the kitchen because I am so into cooking and it is where I spend most of my time. I think of it as a haven and use cooking as a form of meditation or therapy. If I am stressed out, I will go into the kitchen and bake a cake, it relaxes me. I might do cookies, shortbread and bread, and a lot of the time it doesn't get eaten – like a rose and apricot cake I made recently that my kids found strange. It's not to do with the end produce, but is about the making and the process that I love and the creativity in it.
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What items do you love most?
I have a little table riddled with woodworm that I got out of an old farmhouse in Castlepollard that was about to be torn down. It had a Belfast sink on the ground, two old tables and a metal hook – rubbish to farmers. The table has that patina of age and, though worn, is something I love and will have forever. We shot our autumn winter campaign on it last year.
I collect pottery, nothing expensive or fancy, and I love the whole idea that the glaze is different in every item. I have pieces by Mirin Mooney, Stephen Pearce's daughter, and I now drink coffee from one of her mugs every morning – it has a little dent in the side to hold your thumb. And a third item is a painting by Jim Manley from a photograph my father took. It's a view of Istanbul out of the apartment which belonged to the director of Topkapi palace and in which my parents lived in the 1980s. I used the colours of the rooftops – muted pinks – for my debut collection for Dunnes.
Who is your favourite designer?
I love Axel Vervoodt, the Belgian interior architect (whose clients include Bill Gates, Robert de Niro and Sting) who is influenced by the Japanese idea of wabi sabi and his wonderful use of space filtered through his northern European aesthetic.
And the London-based interior designer Rose Uniake who has a similar simple aesthetic – she will use cotton sheets to hang as curtains or spartan linen on beds in a vast beautifully embellished Georgian interior and I love that juxtaposition.
Which artists do you most admire?
At the moment, it would be Vilhelm Hammerschoi who was a Danish painter in the late 1800s who painted a lot of empty rooms and people with their backs to the viewer, but they have such depth.
I also like the US abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler who dragged paint on massive big canvases on the floor with huge paintbrushes and whose roots were in Japanese calligraphy and the idea that one brushstroke expresses all.
One of the most moving things I have ever seen was by the artist Marina Abramovic at the Museum of Modern Art in New York six years ago when she did a performance called The Artist is Present, sitting in the room where she faced you in a chair – there was this electricity in the air and you felt the power of the human presence.
What is your biggest interior turn off?
Something that looks like a showroom – without soul or personality, and where everything is off the peg and brand new. It just looks cold.
Which travel destination stands out?
I have just been in Vietnam for work and I was blown away by the people and the culture. It was a surface experience of only four or five days, but its tradition of craft and the quality and skills are incredible.
You have the local and the French colonial influence in food and the bread is a mix of croissant and baguette and that combination with fresh herbs and seafood is amazing.
If you had €100,000 to spend on anything for the home, what would it be? I would probably buy reclaimed floorboards, which I love. If you had unlimited funds you could build a new house using reclaimed materials that bring with them their history and their story of something that was worn, that was loved and had soul. I have pitch pine floorboards from an old convent in the extension to the house in Westmeath, where they create character that links the new building to the old house.
