“It’s vital that your household normally takes treatment of you, not that you just take care of your property,” states the New York-primarily based Irish designer known merely as Clodagh. The style and design philosophy of the Sligo-born inside designer, who has initiatives in 24 nations, is “to make persons happy and cozy in their environment”.
“I test to style the frustrations out of people’s lives. The greatest point about currently being a designer is when shoppers get in touch with you up and notify you that their lives have adjusted and family members relations are much better due to the fact of what we’ve accomplished,” she says.
The Clodagh Style and design studio in Manhattan has a staff members of about 20, with a portfolio that ranges from households to lodges, spas, dining places, outlets, workplaces, luxurious yachts and non-public jets. Clodagh has worked for clientele such as Robert Redford and Elizabeth Arden, and concluded projects together with the Dupont Circle Resort in Washington DC, the lavish higher-increase condominiums in Caledonia in New York, the Avery setting up in San Francisco and the Six Senses Douro Valley spa in Portugal.
In Eire, she has designed a residence on Dalkey’s Sorrento Terrace, the White Horses Spa at the Trump International Resort and Golfing Hyperlinks in Doonbeg, Co Clare, and a transformed cow drop getaway home for her son Tim O’Kennedy in Co Cork.
The Clodagh Collection involves bespoke parts applied in style and design jobs, but her studio has also designed ranges of out of doors furniture, rugs, materials, wall coverings, rest room equipment and tiny sculptural objects. An early adopter of the Feng Shui rules of celebrating the senses and symbolizing all the things (earth, fireplace, wood, metal and drinking water) in structure, she describes herself as an environmentalist, and has been a vegan considering that the 1980s.
“I like strong and robust, hot and tactile – things that last and are not dancing up and down for attention. I just can’t bear the phrase pattern,” she clarifies in a new documentary for RTÉ. Directed by Oda O’Carroll and made by A Curious Doggy Movies Output, the programme is a powerful search back again in excess of Clodagh’s colourful existence, amazing occupation and incredible perform ethic.
Christened Clodagh Fionnuala Maev De Sillery Phipps, she grew up the third kid of John Peddar Phipps and Anna Claire De Sillery Phipps in five diverse houses, which includes the summer season household of Oscar Wilde’s family members in Cong, Co Mayo, and WB Yeats’s uncle’s residence. She describes her family as “downwardly mobile”, advertising the spouse and children silver so their young children could show up at boarding schools.
Recovering on the flat of her again from a everyday living-threatening slide from a horse as a teen, Clodagh (she ditched her prolonged names after the humiliation of listening to them go through out throughout her Intermediate Certification exams) decided to become a style designer when she seen an advertisement for the Grafton Academy of Fashion Design while looking at The Irish Occasions. While her father disapproved of her occupation decision, her mother loaned her £400 to begin her off.
Immediately after completing the training course, Clodagh established up her studio to start with on Dublin’s South Anne Road and afterwards on Baggot Avenue, and experienced her first style present in the Hibernian Hotel in 1956. With her Clodagh of Dublin brand name, she grew to become the youngest member of the Irish Haute Couture Group along with Ib Jorgensen, Sybil Connolly, Neillí Mulcahy and Irene Gilbert.

Via the late 1950s and 1960s, her meteoric increase to prominence as a youthful Irish vogue designer of Irish tweeds, knits and crochets exporting to Australia, New Zealand, the United States, France and Germany ran parallel with her relationship to advertising executive Desmond O’Kennedy and the births of her three youngsters, Tim, Stephen and Peter. By the time she was 27, she experienced realised she was not happy in her marriage and since divorce was not available in Eire, she experienced to live with her spouse for the future five several years though awaiting a lawful separation.
In 1971 a possibility conference with screenwriter Daniel Aubry in the glitzy city of Mojácar in Spain sparked a connection that would endure for more than 50 decades. The pair to begin with moved to New York where Clodagh continued to function as a fashion designer for a time, and her little ones visited for the holiday seasons whilst attending faculty in Ireland.
Then Aubry’s shift into the assets small business observed them move to Spain exactly where Clodagh began her career as an inside designer. In the documentary, she describes looking at the sunlight filter through the dust as demolition started on their new dwelling as the minute she located her legitimate vocation. Even though dwelling in Spain for the next seven several years, she intended eating places, pubs, apartments and houses.
When the few returned to New York in the early 1980s, she and two colleagues opened the style and design studio and little style store in the East Village, Clodagh, Ross and Williams. Vogue magazine described it as the “design store of the decade”.
As the several years rolled on, Clodagh grew to become 1 of America’s most successful interior designers with a plethora of awards which include induction into the Interior Structure Journal Style and design Hall of Fame. She was also named as a person of the major 100 designers in the environment by Architectural Digest.
Now at the age of 82, she continue to will work 11-hour times in her style and design studio. Her husband, Daniel Aubry, describes her as a “force of nature”. Her youngest son, Peter O’Kennedy, who life with his household two doors’ down from her in New York, is now inventive director of Clodagh Types.
She has created three textbooks on interior style, Overall Layout (2001), Your Residence, Your Sanctuary (2008) and Existence-Boosting Design (2019).

The 4 Cs
Talking to The Irish Times around Zoom from her studio in New York, she reiterates her 4 Cs as the commencing level for creating your area. “Contemplate: the place you are now and exactly where to want to go. Cleanse: do some psychological and bodily de-cluttering (get rid of the terror of antiques and old stuff you grew up with). Explain: make a few lists – your will have to-haves, your would-be-nices and one thing fantastic (your want listing). And then, Generate,” she clarifies.
She’s all on for people today jumping straight to their wish checklist, by putting in a fountain in the hall or acquiring something that will really increase their lives, like a beautiful piece of art or a notably good television or seem method.
Her enthusiasm for artwork, tunes, movies, journey and cooking sustains her, she claims, and personal tragedy (her middle son, Steve, died at the age of 23) and her have near-demise experiences (a fall on a constructing internet site in Portugal and some terrifying flights) have grounded her. “I’ve had some significant incidents which prods you into an recognition that life is wonderful and not to linger on absurdities,” she says.
Her involvement with the Thorn Tree task, which fundraises for the education of youngsters in the nomadic Samburu tribe in northeast Kenya, is also quite vital to her.
An early desire in Buddhism has formulated into a lifelong curiosity in astrology, minimalism and the incorporation of character into layout. She thinks clutter can undermine serenity, but the minimalism ought to not be self-denying. She asks everybody she encounters what their star indicator is.
Sustainability is also a priority. “We have a ‘give-away’ bin at property for factors we are not making use of. Accumulation is risky. I like to give away one particular factor each individual working day,” she claims.
Clodagh, a documentary on the daily life of trailblazing Irish designer is on RTÉ One particular tv on Thursday, May perhaps 5th, at 10.15pm