Why Scandinavian Design Chose Me

It was not really a choice. Not at first.

In 2016, I found Iceland. I stood in front of mountains that seemed to have no need to perform or impress anything. Just there. Raw and simple and so impossibly grand that I realised beauty does not need to shout. It whispers. The landscape was stripped back to its essence and something in watching it shifted something in me. I did not have the words for it then, but I felt it. Something awakened.

I did not know that I was being introduced to what would later become the foundation of everything I create.

The Empty Space

Four years later, in 2020, we bought a property in South Dublin. A blank space. One hundred square meters with ceilings that soared to 3.40 meters and nothing else. Cement walls. Concrete floors. Empty. The structure was there, but there was no soul in it yet.

Then the world locked down.

We found ourselves confined to this hollow space, just the two of us. Nowhere else to go. Nothing else to do. Just us and the emptiness. And I remember feeling something familiar in it. The rawness, the silence, the sense of something waiting to be shaped.

We knew we had to build something meaningful here. And we had time to do it.

Learning to Choose

So we learned.

Every weekend, we became students of our own space. We researched everything. What materials felt right. What philosophy we wanted to live by. How we wanted a home to feel. And that is when I found it: Scandinavian design. Nordic philosophy. Not as a trend or an aesthetic, but as a genuine framework for how to live thoughtfully.

The more I read, the more I studied, the more I recognised a language for something I had always felt but never fully understood. Here was a design system built on restraint, intention, and the idea that space and emptiness are not empty at all, they are full of meaning.

We painted. We tiled. We made decisions and mistakes and bought things that did not belong, then took them away. We invested in pieces that took weeks to arrive from different countries across Northern Europe. We waited for them the way people used to wait for things that mattered. With actual care and anticipation. Knowing that each object was chosen, not grabbed.

The Chevron smoked oak flooring from Hungary that we wanted took months to arrive. Companies closed. Carpenters disappeared. We waited in that half-finished space and the waiting felt aligned somehow.

Right.

The space itself was teaching us its rhythm.

The Philosophy

And slowly, as I read and researched deeper, I fell completely in love. Not with how things looked, but with why they were designed the way they were.

Scandinavian design is not about owning less. It is about choosing with purpose. Everything in a home should either support the way you live or bring quiet meaning to the everyday. Space is a material. Emptiness is foundation, not failure. When you live with clutter, it costs you something…your ability to think clearly, to feel at peace.

Norway and Hygge

By the end of 2021, airports opened again. We knew exactly where we needed to go.

Norway.

We went to live in the wild. Away from technology. Away from everything that was not essential. Husky sledding through mountains. Fjords stretching in every direction. Nights around fires we built ourselves. Wood burning. Water frozen. Air so clear it felt like breathing light.

We had nothing there except time with each other and the elements. And in that simplicity, I understood.

This is where Scandinavian design comes from. Not from design schools, but from living in a place where being deliberate is survival. Where warmth matters. Where gathering around fire matters. The materials you live with: wood, wool, linen, fur, stone are not just decorative. They are how you survive.

That is when hygge became real to me.

Hygge is not coziness. It is the practice of finding warmth, connection and meaning in simple moments. It is creating a space to be fully present in life, not to escape it. Gathering close with people and materials you love and finding that to be enough.

Standing in the Norwegian snow, feeling the fire’s warmth, I realised: this is what I had been trying to build in Dublin. A home where beauty was not decorative, but deeply connected to warmth, shelter, material and meaning.

My Art Studio, My Sanctuary

I discovered something important about myself during those months of waiting, building and learning.

I cannot function when my home is in disorder. I know how that sounds. Controlled. Maybe anxious. But it is not about perfectionism. It is about sanctuary.

My home is where my mind and creativity live. When I turned thirty, my husband created something extraordinary: my art workshop. A studio where I could paint and create. My mind can only be at peace when everything has its place and has been chosen. Every object in our space carries a story. We either made it or we saved for it. There is nothing here by accident.

The Ethnicraft Anders Buffet that took months to arrive? We know exactly why it is there.

Every Danish piece we brought in one at a time? They are proof that we know what we love and we are patient enough to wait.

From Sanctuary to Calling

By 2023, our home was a beautiful fusion of French elegance and Scandinavian design. Every person who entered felt calm. It felt like a showroom, they would say. They felt peace in the space.

Then Lou arrived in May 2023.

The art studio became her bedroom. During my maternity leave, in the silence of her nap times, I felt something familiar. I wanted to learn. I wanted to create again.

I pursued my formal interior design certification from an instructor I truly admire. But during those classes, I realised I was the outlier. While other students embraced classic & traditional design, I wanted to break the codes. I wanted to bring something quieter, warmer and more minimal to Ireland. Something that felt deeply lived, not simply styled.

Once certified, we bought another property. Another blank canvas. But this time I was preparing to create homes for others, not just for us.

I threw myself into more research on Japanese and Scandinavian design. I started posting on Instagram. My ideas, my sketches & moodboards. A couple of days later, my very first client from Rathfarnham contacted me. She wanted Nordic Simplicity in her living space.

Two days later, I was there. Creating exactly what I had been moving towards for years, without fully knowing it.

It was not a choice anymore. It was a calling.

How It Chose Me

When I chose Scandinavian design as my specialty, I thought I was choosing a style or an aesthetic direction.

But it was never about aesthetics at all.

It was about honouring a part of myself that finds real peace in intention. That believes homes should feel carefully curated, not copied from catalogues. That understands minimalism not as going without, but as clarity. That knows the difference between space that rests you and emptiness that is lonely.

My trips up North awakened something in me. The lockdown of 2020 forced me to research and understand it. Iceland, Norway and Denmark taught me how to live it.

And every year since, Copenhagen has become a tradition. I return to its design studios, galleries, makers and carefully considered spaces to reconnect with the philosophy that shaped everything I create. It has become a kind of pilgrimage for me: a place where I remember why this matters. My husband may not walk every showroom or study every object with me, but he has always supported the direction I felt called to explore. He has stood beside the dream, even when it was still forming. In his own way, he has shown me, year after year, that he believes in what I am building.

And then there is my father. He calls me every single day to find out how all my projects are advancing. He asks about each space, each client, each challenge. He pushes me to levels of success that I never thought I could reach. He sees what I am capable of before I do. His belief in me has become the foundation of my own belief in what I am creating.

And through living it, through returning to Copenhagen every single year, through having people around me who genuinely believe in my vision, I discovered that Scandinavian design is about something very simple and very profound: how we live and what we choose to surround ourselves with are not shallow decisions. They are declarations about what we believe matters. They are statements about who we are.

Every object is a yes or a no. Every room is a choice. Every fire we gather around, every meal we share, every material we touch with our hands…these things tell the story of what we think makes a life worth living.

I have decided that I want to fill my life with intentional choices. With things that are chosen with care. With objects and spaces that tell the true story of who we are, not who we thought we should be. With things that bring warmth and presence and real meaning into the everyday.

But more than that, I want to bring this philosophy to other homes. I want to help people discover what I have discovered. I want to show them that how we live is a declaration of what matters.

That is what Scandinavian design means to me now.

Not just a style. Not just an aesthetic.

A way of living with intention.

And that is why I cannot imagine living any other way.

The photographs throughout this piece are my own, captured during travels across Northern Europe over the past decade.