Jo Anne Butler and Gearoid Muldowney make household objects and botanical prints that someone living in toadstool would appreciate. The results are so of a piece and tantalizingly evocative of their corner of the world that we asked them to show us where they live.
Photography by Superfolk.
The family rent a 200 year-old stone house in the County Mayo village of Westport, population about 5,500.
Their cottage is part of an enclave of dockworker and fishermen s dwellings in the town s docks area and Jo Anne tells us has really shaped how we live When...
...the sun shines this house pushes us outside to the beach to go exploring or fishing When the wind howls around us in January our place is solid unmoving and so cozy
The couple design in tandem but divide the labor: Gearoid, winner of the 2011 Future Maker award from the Crafts Councils of Ireland, is the resident woodworker, and Jo Anne, who has a master’s degree in architecture and studied fine art, is the printmaker.
Photograph by Doreen Kilfeather.
The house has two rooms downstairs, plus a galley kitchen, and two bedrooms upstairs—each floor is 36 square meters (236 square feet). To accommodate life in tight quarters, almost all of the couple’s designs are made to hang.
The hearth is inset with a woodburning stove.
Clew Bay is part of the rugged coastal stretch known as the Wild Atlantic Way.
The dining table area is set off by an exposed stone wall hung with a Superfolk print.
Gearoid made the rail using pegs that Jo Anne purchased on a visit to the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine (the unfinished Shaker Pegs are available from the museum’s online shop for 60 cents each, 25 for $14.25).
“Peg rails are great for lifting things off the floor, especially when you have a crawling baby in the mix,” says Jo Anne.
The print is Autumn Beech Leaf, €240 ($286.46), hand-carved and block-printed by Jo Anne on deckle-edged Japanese washi paper.
The narrow galley kitchen is painted in a soft gray from Dulux called Apple Box and a basic white.
Windows in the cottage are small and deep.
A round wooden tray, a prototype yet to be put into production, shares the table with a Meander candlestick and Ash Trivet.
Woody, the family’s Weimaraner, leads the way to the pale pink sitting room, which has its original wide-plank floorboards and fireplace.
The room is also the play area, decorated with a trio of Superfolk seaweed prints: Atlantic Wakame, Channelled Wrack, and Bladder Wrack, all €78 ($93.14).
The prints hang from Superfolk medium Hanging Frames, €30 ($35.65), which incorporate hidden magnets.
Superfolk’s Copper Beech Leaf print sets the autumnal palette in the couple’s bedroom.
The rustic bedside tables are old Irish pieces with “a clever use of timber sections” that Jo Anne says remind them of Italian designer Enzo Mari’s 1970s Autoprogettazione series.
A wardrobe of woolens is essential in these parts.
Gearoid’s wood shop is in the back of the house, where the couple tend a long flower garden and vegetable plot, “just as the original family living in this terrace did.”
Go to the couple’s Instagram feed, @superfolk, to see more of their surroundings. And go to Superfolk to find more of their designs and a list of stockists, including Makers & Brothers, who introduced us to Jo Anne and Gearoid.