Roisin Lafferty’s new paint collection offers a chance to inject colour into every room
Roisin Lafferty is one of Ireland’s biggest and boldest designers.
Her work has graced the pages of dozens of international glossy titles, including Architectural Digest, four different editions of Elle Decoration, Dezeen, Living Etc., Vogue Living, Marie Claire Maison and Living Corriere.
Her first big break was as one of the judges on RTE’s Super Garden programme, and everything she’s put her name to since demonstrates her signature colourful style.
As well as numerous private clients, her commercial projects include First Landings for Icons Group in Skerries; Urban HQ, an office rental agency in Belfast; and several Dublin clinics, including Sisu, cosmetic medicine and treatments and Fitzgerald private clinic.
In retail, the Riyadh-based nail bar Base and Boon in Saudi Arabia.
The nail bar is a place where her professional life and a personal pastime intersect, for when she wants to relax, she likes to paint her nails, and the use of lacquered furniture is a decorative trope she uses to great effect.
In the hospitality sector, she’s designed the Ballsbridge branch of Cinnamon café.
Her recent work, the Woodland Suite Experience at the Montenotte Hotel in Cork, has garnered many accolades.
It is a finalist for Best Hotel Design of the Year at the Independent Hotel Show Awards in London, with winners announced in early October (6th); it has been shortlisted for suite of the year at the Boutique Hotelier Awards (Winners also announced 6th October) and is shortlisted for the World Architecture Festival 2025.
She’s also moved her office space, establishing Roisin Lafferty Gallery in a Georgian townhouse on Fitzwilliam Square, where the first two floors are furnished with a mix of her own pieces of furniture and her playful new accessories, resin vessels that look like Murano glass, until you touch them and they wobble.
The idea is to show off many of her ideas in a residential setting to better help her private clients see how her sketched ideas might come to life.
At hall level, the floors and some of the architraves feature book-matched marbles from Miller Brothers, and some of the walls have a polished plaster finish.
In the main reception rooms are pieces by London-based Irish designer, Bryan O’Sullivan, and luxury vintage sourced by Domhnall O’Gairbhi of Acquired.ie and by Killian McNulty, whose eponymous gallery is on Francis Street, Dublin 8.
From behind the deep pile velvet curtains, the stairwell leads up to her main office, on the first floor piano nobile, which features two mid-century desks supplied by McNulty.
The walls are covered in rich pigmented shades from her new paint collection for Prestige by Fleetwood.
With the technical pigmentation of the collection, the result of years of work in the laboratory by Fleetwood’s R&D manager, Karena Hyland, the range of colours delivers as luxurious a finish as the rare pieces that fill the room.
Lafferty did quite a lot of the painting herself to test the quality.
“In many places I only had to apply one coat,” she says.
