A show home has one job. Someone walks through the door, and within about ten seconds they either picture themselves living there or they don't. Everything after that — the brochure, the second viewing, the conversation with the agent — is easier or harder depending on what happened in those ten seconds.
So when our interior design department was asked to take on the show apartment at Carrigan Quay on the Sligo Road, that's what we designed for. Not a room that photographs well and feels like a shop. A home someone can imagine putting their own kettle in.
Starting with what the building already had
The bones at Carrigan Quay are good, and a show home should agree with the architecture rather than argue with it. Herringbone floors, deep coving, a media wall with slatted timber and an inset fire, and a balcony looking straight out over the Erne.
That last one decided a lot. When a room has a view, the furniture's job is to point at it and then get out of the way. We kept the seating low and the palette quiet, so that the brightest thing in the room is the window.
The palette
Warm greys and soft stone through the walls and the large upholstery, with ochre as the accent — a mustard corduroy tub chair, a mustard love seat, and the same tone picked up in the cushions and the rugs.
Ochre does something useful in this part of the world. Our light is grey for a good stretch of the year, and a warm accent stops a neutral room from reading as cold on a wet Tuesday in February, which is when plenty of viewings happen. It's also a colour most people can live with. Bolder accents photograph beautifully and then put off every second buyer.
We let the dark tones do the anchoring: a round dark-stained dining table, a matching round coffee table, black metal legs, bronze vessels on the console. Against pale walls and a mid-oak herringbone floor, that's what keeps the scheme from floating.
Another corner of the apartment makes the whole argument on its own. A slim console with a concrete top on black A-frame legs, two dark bronze bottles at one end, white lilies in glass at the other, and above it a framed landscape with real colour in it — greens, ochres and a bit of violet, the same family the rest of the scheme runs on. Nothing else on the shelf. That is the level of styling a show home wants: enough that a corner reads as finished, little enough that a buyer can still picture their own things there.
The living and dining space
The apartment opens living onto dining, which is the layout most buyers now want and the hardest one to furnish. Get it wrong and it reads as one long corridor of furniture.
We zoned it with a rug. A large abstract in blue, grey and ochre sits under the seating with the front legs of the sofa and the chairs standing on it, which draws a line around the living half without putting up a wall. The dining table is round rather than rectangular, because a round table lets people move past it in an open-plan room, and it softens what would otherwise be a lot of straight lines in a row.
The sofa is a deep channel-back in a pale textured weave — the kind of piece that looks generous in photographs and is genuinely comfortable to sit in, which matters when a viewer tries it. Facing it, a single accent chair rather than a pair, so the room doesn't feel like a waiting area.
The bedrooms
Bedrooms are where a buyer stops being a viewer. They have seen the kitchen, they have looked at the view, and now they are working out whether their own bed would fit. We gave each one its own scheme rather than repeating a single look from room to room. A viewer should walk out having seen options, not a template.
The main bedroom runs on oak — bedside table, chest of drawers and dressing table in the same light timber — warmed with terracotta in the curtains and the throw, and cushions in terracotta, teal and cream. A round mirror sits over the chest of drawers, doing the same job the round dining table does in the living room: one curved shape in a room that is otherwise all straight lines.
The second is cooler. A wide grey-taupe chest with long vertical handles, a grey upholstered headboard, a large cream abstract canvas above the bed, soft-striped curtains and a square mirror on the wall opposite. The accent is plum and lilac velvet in the cushions, a different family to the ochre in the living room, and that is deliberate. A show home that runs one accent colour through every room reads as styled. One that changes room by room reads as lived in.
The upholstered headboard earns its place in a room this size. It gives the bed presence in a photograph without taking up any floor, and it softens the wall that would otherwise be the hardest surface a viewer sees on the way in.
The hallway
Hallways get skipped in show homes and they shouldn't. It's the first room, and it's usually the smallest.
We used a narrow console — a marble top with softened corners on a curved base in dark wood, deep enough for a lamp and a set of keys, shallow enough not to catch your hip on the way past. Above it, a black oval mirror with a copper inner lip, which bounces what light there is back down the hall and makes a narrow space read wider than it is.
Then almost nothing else: a lamp on a stone base, a textured bronze bottle, one small framed picture, and a brass umbrella stand by the door. The warm metals are the thread that holds it together — bronze on the console edge, copper in the mirror, brass on the stand — and they pick up the same ochre the living room runs on, which is what stops the hall reading like a different house. Restraint works harder in a small space than styling does.
What we do for a developer
We have been furnishing homes from our Enniskillen showroom and across the Foy & Company group since 1981. A show home project runs through our interior design department, and it runs the same way each time.
We visit the property and measure it properly. We put together a scheme — palette, layout, the specific pieces — and show it to you before anything is ordered. We source it, which for a show home usually means pulling from several suppliers and keeping them all to one date. Then our own team delivers and installs, places every piece, and styles the rooms down to the cushions and the flowers.
One contact for the whole thing, and a set of rooms that are ready the day you open.
Thinking about a show home?
If you've a development coming to market in Fermanagh, Tyrone or the surrounding area, we'd be glad to talk about it. Call the showroom on +44 28 6605 0147 or email sales@foysinteriors.co.uk.
Carrigan Quay is being marketed by McGovern Estate Agents in Enniskillen, and the properties are worth a look whether you're buying or just nosy about the finish.