Rich, earthy colours are the spice of life for the winner of episode 6 of Home of the Year. The artisan terraced house is on a popular street location for music videos and film in Stoneybatter, Dublin 7 where The Spice Girls filmed one of their hits.
Photography: Kelan Molloy
Finbarr Collins bought the two-up, two-down terraced house on Carnew Street in Stoneybatter in 2021
He met Derry man Gareth Scott almost as soon as he got his keys.
Gareth was just back in Ireland after having spent a decade in Australia.
A Spice Girls superfan, Gareth, couldn’t believe that Finbarr lived on what he called “Spice Girl Street”.
The Spice Girls made the video for Stop, from their second album, Spiceworld, in Dublin 7’s Carnew Street.
In it, it doubles as a 1960s Northern English working-class town, where the five girls knocked on doors and danced with the real locals, who were paid £100 punts to star in the Motown-inspired single’s key sales pitch.
The street has also been seen on screen in the film of the misery-lit book by Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes and Niall Jordan’s biopic, Michael Collins, with sets for the latter built at Grangeorman, before it became the TU Dublin campus.
During recording, Victoria Beckham and her troupe reportedly politely knocked on street doors requesting to use the facilities.
This was before Finbarr's time in residence.
These houses are not big, he notes. But they do have good ceiling heights, which increases the volume in the rooms.
“You have to maximise every millimetre,” And he has. The small hall has glass block internal glazing to help bring light into the middle of the house.
“I had to do it in phases,” he explains, beginning with the kitchen, which he moved from the back of the house to the front. The ply door fronts are finished in Bancha, a deep olive, a new colour from Farrow & Ball.
“It's really nice up against the fluted oak overhead cabinets, and their contrast ended up informing the rest of the house.”
If Finbarr speak like a designer, that may be because he has gone back to college and retrained, doing a course in interior design at Griffith College.
"There’s been a lot of conversation about my use of colour," he admits. "I didn’t plan it, but I’ve been a lot bolder than I realised."
An engineer working in robotics, he was able to make use of several digital tools, including Revit, Autocad and SketchUp to illustrate what he was looking for, to give to the kitchen fabricator, Robert Dempsey.
The oak cabinets are set into the alcoves on either side of the chimney breast, into which an extractor fan for over the hob has been concealed.
It’s a smart use of what otherwise could be dead space.
The ground floor is now an open plan room, with the kitchen countertop creating a natural boundary and half wall against which to position the sofa, which he got at the 1933 Furniture Company.
Across from it, against the party wall, which has been covered in cork, is a small dining table.
His father helped out a lot.
“He’s a handy and hardy west Cork farmer. All he cared about was its proximity to Croke Park for match days,” he says.
“We had no bathroom for a couple of months. I’d go up to Belfast to have a hot shower, Gareth would joke.”
The bathroom is to the back of the house, in a return and accessed via a walk-through utility room.
Sketches illustrating how he optimised every cm here can be seen on his Instagram handle, My Stoney Better Home.
The courtyard is the last thing we did.
"I built all the benches myself."
He now likes to sit at the double doors that open out and enjoy the verdant space.
The bedrooms are richly hued. The ochre yellow is a breathable clay paint, from Aura Paints, perfect for use on breathable materials such as brick.
In the spare bedroom, which doubles as a home office, the burnt orange colour is Paint and Paper Library’s The Long Room.
He’s launched his own office, Studio Barra.
“Part of the reason I went on the show was to showcase something I had designed myself. I’m going to see where it takes me. It may open doors for me,” he explains.
Will Amanda’s eye be twitching when she walks in here, he wonders.
The answer is evident on the Player.
Home of the Year series 12 airs Tuesdays, 7 pm on RTÉ One. You can also watch it on the RTÉ Player. You can follow interior designer owner Finbarr Collins’ Instagram here, My Stoney Better Home.
