Design in Dublin: How Inner City Businesses are Creating Inviting Spaces


Posted August 1, 2018 in More

Dublin is a city on the up. Home to the European headquarters of big businesses like Google, Facebook, PayPal, Twitter, Yahoo, eBay, and even Microsoft, it is fast becoming a commercial centre, so it’s little wonder that its inner city businesses are leading the way when it comes to the chicest and most stylish of interior designs.

The focus is primarily on creating inviting spaces. Modern enterprises are fast coming to realise that although professionalism must always be an aesthetic priority, there is more to creating a commercial space than sterile lines and futuristic exteriors. Rather, they’re embracing the trend towards welcoming designs that invite visitors to come in and sit themselves down.

For smaller businesses looking to replicate this in their own premises, here are some of the hottest inner city trends you can emulate on a budget…

Bright and light 

In modern interior design, a key component in creating warm and welcoming aesthetics is the lighting you select – a fact Dublin-based businesses are espousing. With a trend towards carefully selected ceiling lights and clever placement, the look that companies are going for is bright and light, with warm, yellowish tones to offset any potential harshness. The effect is to create spaces that seem as if they’re filled with sunshine even when natural light is limited.

This is not something amateurs are always able to replicate for themselves, but luckily for smaller concerns, there’s expert help out there so long as you know where to look. Companies like lights.ie will happily share their insights with those who get in touch, making it easy to replicate big business styling on even the smallest of budgets.

Quirky colour palettes

In order to look professional, one might imagine that sticking to a pared-back colour palette is an incontrovertible rule. According to the example of big businesses, however, we’ve got it all wrong. Gordon House on Barrow Street, the European headquarters of tech giant Google, offers a perfect case in point. A multicoloured designer’s dream, it was created and crafted by the combined efforts of Dublin-based Reddy Architecture + Urbanism and New York’s HLW.

Although such a unique aesthetic may be a bit too quirky and out-there for those with more limited space to pull it off, it can be replicated in slightly scaled-down form by incorporating a feature wall or two into your own interior styling. Think warm, bright colours and graphic patterns and you won’t go far wrong.

Mixing materials 

Source: Pixabay

If there is one other obvious commonality between the interior styling of Dublin’s biggest businesses, it’s the readiness to play around with various materials. Cool metals mingle with warm wood to create spaces that are contemporary without being clinical. There is a mixing of styles; a willingness to break the rules and make something that marks each property as entirely unique from its counterparts. Where Facebook’s headquarters rely heavily on rich, red-toned wood combined with the stark simplicity of concrete, the Airbnb Warehouse goes in a different direction and pairs an industrial aesthetic with lots of glass to encourage natural light. The lesson to take away: experimentation is all the rage, and warmth is key.

How will you replicate the effect in your own workplace?

Feature Image – Source: Pixabay

NEWSLETTER

The key to the city. Straight to your inbox. Sign up for our newsletter.

SEARCH

National Museum 2024 – English

NEWSLETTER

The key to the city. Straight to your inbox. Sign up for our newsletter.