An Irish interior designer’s filmic reimagining of glass and steel offices has created spaces that look like film sets, where Irish art and design loom colourfully large. Emily Ni Chuinneain is one to watch.
Pics: Ruth Maria
When it wanted to upgrade its London, Dublin and Chicago offices, Irish-founded AI-first customer service platform Intercom, a major tech unicorn, called on Emily Cunnane, who also goes by Emily Ni Chuinneain, an interior designer who approaches mood, volume and space as if a set designer.
It was co-founder and chairman Eoghan McCabe who spotted her work, she explains. “The CEO is Irish and saw my Instagram. It was so random. He lives in America.”
He had someone in the office get in touch. Founded in 2011, the firm provides helpdesk software, including its AI agent, Fin, to over 30,000 businesses and 1,400 employees across its six offices, which are in San Francisco, Chicago, Sydney, Berlin, London and Dublin, considered a significant hub.
Cunnane has designed three of the six, Dublin, London and Chicago, reimagining them almost as if set pieces rather than the typical corporate office look.
Wes Anderson influences abound, but so too does the influence of the sector the firm works in.
“The Intercom gig is a big one,” she says. “Original artworks drive the visual narrative.”
Art may have set the tone, but then she coloured in between those lines, telling the story and personality of the brand through the artworks, and the furniture and furnishings.
Bland corporate art and typical mid-century classics simply wouldn’t cut it. She has an appreciation of the value of one-off pieces.
“They were looking for something with personality,” she explains.
“Offices can be very generic, very grey and white. They wanted someone to work with their branding team and Intercom’s new branding.”
She had a lot of meetings with Scott Smith, Intercom’s branding director, “teasing out how it might feel, that it would be welcoming, somewhere the team would want to hang out.”
This collaborative approach has served up an edgy space that has a filmic feel, a little dystopian and also future-looking, kind of perfect for an AI company.
Intercom is forward-thinking, she says. “It’s an AI brand that’s about thinking into the future, but it still wants people to feel the human side of things.”
Art plays a huge role in adding that human touch, she says.
She chose talent whose work is more figurative than abstract and who were working within the same warm palette she had chosen, so in colours such as oranges, reds and yellows, artists.
These include Enda Burke, selected because “his pieces almost look like AI. There’s a David Hockney quality to them”. He builds sets, and the image is a photograph of that set.
Peter Smyth’s colourful, abstract paintings start life as observations on ecology, with 3D models and digital printouts made first.
The Dublin office is an utterly contemporary building on St Stephen’s Green.
Large and set over three floors, the top floor is fully glazed with terraces looking out at views across Dublin.
This is also a multi-tasking that has to perform several roles within the company.
By day, it’s a place where colleagues can gather, have a coffee or collaborate over lunch.
By night, it completely changes personality. Its three-metre high tambour doors glide back to reveal a tomato red interior that is, in and of itself, mood changing.
The fact that it is a bar also enhances a different mood. The design is by Bear Creation.
A breakout space features hanging steel tubes in tonal colours as a screen. These appear to float in mid-air, as if by magic, but are held in place by the use of magnets.
Elsewhere, she uses Douglas fir plywood panelling tinted so that you get to see its texture. It almost looks like watermark taffeta. Narrow strips of it are used to frame an artwork, while circular pieces are affixed to create textural interest.
Tiled panels do likewise.
In another part of the offices, a table made of Douglas fir has actually been coated in two different colours, which have been sanded in parts by Bear Creation.
The result looks like a big cat print “That’s why I love working with people like this. We bounce off each other.”
She uses a lot of rugs as art too and commissioned several pieces by Cork artist Shane O’Driscoll from Ceadogan, the Co Wexford-based rugmaker.
They act as an acoustic component, and when hung, means she can put up really large pieces.
The designer is on an upward trajectory of her own. During Covid, she upped sticks, sold the home she and her partner shared in Stoneybatter and moved to Cascais, south of Lisbon in Portugal, to see if she could make working worldwide work for her.
It has. “I’m here (in Portugal) doing my designs on my laptop and come home every six weeks or so, or go to a project location.”
When back in Ireland, she tries to squeeze all site visits into three days, leaving time to see friends and family, which she says she now sees more of because she makes arrangements to meet up.
To find out more about Emily Cunnane Design, visit emilycunnane.com. To read more about Intercom, visit intercom.com
