Uncrowded house

A commercial space, bought for a song before city living became popular, has been revamped as a home for musician Nick Seymour and his family, writes EMMA CULLINAN

ITTING IN THIS neat, sleek, retro-Modern apartment overlooking life on Dublin’s Exchequer Street you can’t imagine its former existence as – how shall I put this without sounding cheesy? – a crowded house. The flat has just been refurbished by Nick Seymour and Nicola McCutcheon who now live with a beautiful, thick spine wall down the middle of their apartment, filled with storage spaces.

Seymour, the bassist with the Australian band Crowded House (whose hits include Take the Weather with You and Don’t Dream it’s Over) bought the apartment in 1993 when his outsider’s eye saw the attraction of a place that many locals wouldn’t touch.

“The price was completely ridiculous for a western European capital. When I was told this place was 50 grand, I was like, what?” The person he bought it from had intended to buy the whole building, part of the Edwardian redbrick block that straddles George’s Arcade, but then persuaded lots of different people to purchase parts of it.

“I met him in Lillie’s Bordello. I didn’t know him terribly well. I tried to get a couple of mates of mine from the music industry in London to buy the floor below this and they told me I was crazy getting involved with people I didn’t know.”

They weren’t the only ones who questioned Seymour’s ideas. When he told the person he bought the space from that he would turn it into a home, the man replied: “People don’t do that. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” “He tried to convince me that because I was from somewhere else I didn’t quite understand how people live in Ireland: no one lives in the inner city.”

Seymour did think of renting it out as an artists’ studio, but when Crowded House split in 1996 (they are back together now) the native of Melbourne felt he wasn’t tied to that city any more: “I felt I could live anywhere and so I came over here. It was a bachelor apartment for the longest time; a funky, big, open-plan thing that looked like the set from Friends.

“It was such a vibrant time that I got used to living here and ended up putting down roots.”

And, as it does, life gradually changed again. Nick met Nicola, they had babies (Lola, who is three, and Francis, a few months old). They have two homes in Melbourne and a house in Sligo, and the Dublin apartment now has the added attraction of a studio downstairs which Seymour bought some years later. So the apartment needed to change with its owners.

Exchequer Street also became noisy. “You’ve got functions on the second floors of buildings across the street. Incredibly bad DJs from the country talking over records – all distorted – and wedding bands. In the bar across the road they have loud music until three in the morning,” says Seymour. “And then,” says McCutcheon, “Dunnes Stores moved in, so once the music finally stopped, you started to get deliveries; big, thumping trucks.”

An initial solution was to board up their bedroom window overlooking the street. But Seymour accepts what city living involves. “You can’t stop noise. There’s no point in complaining about it; you have to take measures to address it.” So they called on Jim Lawler, of Melted Snow Architects, also a musician.

His brief was to reconfigure the space to suit their family needs, to address the street noise and to incorporate storage. “We had incredible storage problems,” recalls McCutcheon. “We had accumulated a lot of stuff over the 14 years we’d been here.”

“It was like stepping into the Steptoe and Son set,” laughs Seymour.

Lawler decided to put the sleeping areas to the back of the apartment, overlooking a courtyard, and the living spaces, including the kitchen, to the front.

“I came up with the idea of a spine wall, with a series of storage solutions, to declutter the entire floor plan,” he says. This required intricate joinery so he brought in Patrick McKenna of Wabi-Sabi, makers of kitchens and built-in furniture, at an early stage.

“Storage was critical,” says McKenna, who designed the floor-to-ceiling wall after “thinking through the needs of the family and the process of living”.

“The three of us collaborated and got on,” says Lawler, “and Pat suggested various options which Nick really loved.” The third person was builder Eddie Feeney who was “fantastic”, says Lawler.

“Nick was great. The job was so low-stress. It was very easy for the builder to work away. He was very focused and it took about 10 weeks.”

While the family did decamp to Sligo, they also spent some time during the build staying in the studio. “It was exciting,” says McCutcheon. “We’d creep up at night and have a look at what they were doing.”

And now, with silent nights and clutter cleared, the family is happy with their “new” home. “It’s exactly what we wanted,” says Seymour. So, while they still split their lives between Melbourne, Sligo and Dublin, they think they may spend more time here, especially with the addition of the downstairs studio, where Gavin Friday, Lisa Hannigan and Neil Hannon all recently recorded.

“I keep thinking, we’re probably going to be here a lot more than we originally thought.”

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