The State's most distinguished china restorer, Ms Desiree Shortt, closed her business this weekend, after 26 years. Unusually, Ms Shortt undertook this action because of excessive rather than inadequate amounts of work.
"There were 376 pieces here in the studio in April," she explained, "and I thought we'd just never get through all of them." In addition, she wishes to concentrate more on what has until now been a secondary business: corporate entertaining in her Dublin home.
The property in question is one of the most meticulously refurbished 18th century houses on North Great George's Street. Ms Shortt moved into the building in 1975 when she started working as a china restorer. She paid £8,000 for the house, which at the time had 27 sitting tenants. The last of these, who lived in the first-floor drawingroom, moved out in 1993 and since then she has been the sole resident.
From the late 1980s onwards, she has allowed corporate organisations to use the house for entertaining. While most clients come from overseas, a number of government bodies such as the Departments of Foreign Affairs and the Environment have also hired the building, where the Taoiseach has been a guest on several occasions during the past year.
Ms Shortt's successful careers in corporate entertainment and china restoration came about literally by accident. In the late 1960s she emigrated to the US where she worked in advertising. Returning to Ireland after some years, she started her own public relations company, which thrived until she suffered severe spine damage in a horse riding accident. An alternative source of income being required, she trained in London as a china restorer and established her own studio on North Great George's Street. Over the past quarter century, she has, in turn, trained more than 200 students in china restoration and now has former pupils working in this field around the world.
Ms Shortt estimates that since opening her studio, she has probably restored over 20,000 items. She believes her most important commission was the invitation to restore six Chinese terracotta warriors damaged by the collapse of scaffolding when these pieces were brought to Ireland for display at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in 1987.
Although she has officially closed her business, the backlog of work means Ms Shortt will be engaged in china restoration until the middle of September, after which builders move in to transform the basement studio. One of her oldest clients, Mr Desmond Fitzgerald, the Knight of Glin, last week commented that he had "always admired the persistence that Desiree has shown in restoring the house and I think she's shown equal ingenuity and patience in the world of restoring porcelain and pottery".
Pointing out that there are now a number of excellent restorers around the country, Ms Shortt said she has no regrets about leaving the business after so long: "No, not at all, I feel I started to professionalise something, which until then was done by young debs until they got married. And I'm looking forward to continuing the corporate entertainment in the house, which is great fun."