{"id":565645,"date":"2026-07-24T08:46:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T08:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/565645\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T08:46:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T08:46:11","slug":"shayne-brady-dublin-gave-me-a-real-chance-to-find-my-tribe-and-to-feel-okay-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/565645\/","title":{"rendered":"Shayne Brady: \u2018Dublin gave me a real chance to find my tribe and to feel okay\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

I grew up in Co Kildare<\/a> in a small village called Two Mile House. My parents built a lovely bungalow in a field on my grandparents\u2019 farm so it was very rural \u2013 there were no other houses on our road. Today, I live in Waterloo in central London<\/a> because I love the energy of city centres. I love the buzz and the excitement of them and that sense of the unknown. And I find cities really safe. Other people find them scary and dangerous, but I\u2019d feel more nervous in the middle of the countryside.<\/p>\n

Now that I\u2019m in my 40s, I enjoy escaping back to rural Kildare. The fresh air in Kildare is insane. There are certain smells that instantly remind me of home. There\u2019s a lilac tree near my parents\u2019 house, and whenever I catch the scent of lilac, I\u2019m transported back there. When I was a child, my uncles would cut the field behind our house to make hay and they\u2019d turn the hay to dry it. That smell \u2013 I\u2019d like to create my own candle with that scent. I love that I can look up and see the stars from my parents\u2019 house. <\/p>\n

My work ethic comes from my Dad and my creativity from my mother. Dad was a project manager for Oral-B and he was out of the house by ten past seven every morning, but he was always home for dinner, which I really liked. My mother gave up her career at the council to raise me and my two older brothers, Gary and Derek, but she was super-creative and had her own little side hustle. She set up her own company called Marjo Knits \u2013 Marjo is an amalgamation of my parents\u2019 names Mary and Johnny \u2013 from the spare room, and I remember as a child drawing Marjo Knits signs and sticking them to the door so it looked like her office. When my brothers and I were teenagers, we\u2019d be on the knitting machines making jumpers to help her out.<\/p>\n

Dad was very involved with the local GAA, and both my brothers were really good at underage football. I wasn\u2019t. I played until I was about 10 or 11 and then I realised \u2013 no, it\u2019s over for me, I\u2019m really not good at this. It\u2019s a running joke in our family that I have a county medal and my brothers don\u2019t. I was on a team that won, although I in no way contributed to the win, but I still have the medal! <\/p>\n

My brothers were always outside playing football when we were kids. I was in a world of my own imagination. I remember once deciding to create my own mini-garden with a little yellow wall made from leftover bricks belonging to my parents\u2019 house. My Dad made a gate for it and I created a little sign from plaster of Paris. I also made a pond using a basin, and I remember being in a garden centre in France and spotting a little toad-with-a-hole water feature and pleading with my parents to buy it for me. When we got home I hooked it up to a hose so water would pump into the pond. I planted a silver birch and an ash tree from seeds and they\u2019re still there 30 years later, and huge!<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Irishman takes top award in \u2018interior design Oscars\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

At school I was a complete nerd. We were raised to be good \u2013 good in class, good at learning, good at exams. I didn\u2019t love my teenage years though. I moved from an all-boys school in the countryside with a class of 15 and a total of probably 70 students to CBS in Naas, which had about 850 boys and girls. I didn\u2019t fit in and I was struggling getting to know who I was. Being gay in Ireland in the \u201890s was difficult. I worried about disappointing my family, and I felt as if I couldn\u2019t be gay and shouldn\u2019t be gay. There was no real visibility at that time, so I really struggled for a while, but I also knew that I had to be who I was, so I came out quite young, at 17. My parents were, and are, beyond loving and supportive.<\/p>\n

It was really liberating going to DIT Dublin, now TU Dublin<\/a>, to study interior architecture. I was free to just be me and to figure everything out. I was actually christened Shane, but when I moved to Dublin, I added the \u201cy\u201d and it became Shayne. That was me becoming who I felt I was. Twenty years later when I established my own interior design practice, Studio Shayne Brady, I asked myself, \u201cDoes the \u2018y\u2019 stay or go?\u201d I kept it of course. But Dublin gave me a real chance to find my tribe and to feel okay. I loved Dublin and still do.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Irish designer\u2019s kink sex furniture raising eyebrows in LondonOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Irish people are notoriously bad at giving themselves credit, but I think co-founding my first company, Brady Williams, at 29, was brave. I think there is a kind of fearlessness in me \u2013 I know who and what I am and where I\u2019m going. <\/p>\n

I\u2019m lucky that my profession allows me to travel a lot. I\u2019ve always gravitated to Miami and I\u2019m setting up an office there. Miami is the next challenge, the next chapter. My mother always says, \u201cWhat\u2019s for you won\u2019t pass you\u201d and I think that\u2019s a wonderful phrase. I try to live life by going with the flow \u2013 if you fight the waves you start to drown. <\/p>\n

In conversation with Marie Kelly<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I grew up in Co Kildare in a small village called Two Mile House. My parents built a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":565646,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,631,61,60,3770,99,709,1454,72304],"class_list":["post-565645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-for-you","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-kildare","tag-london","tag-magazine","tag-me-myself-and-ireland","tag-tu-dublin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}