A chance meeting in India with a chef from Co Clare led London-based international fashion designer Ann Louise Roswald and her husband Nick Hartley to seek out a base in Ireland. That was nearly 20 years ago in 1997 when she had just graduated from Central St Martins in London and had been snapped up by Liberty in London to create a womenswear collection for them.

"Nick was selling his business in London and we were looking at different places to live and decided to come to Clare and immediately fell in love with the area," she recalls. During a road trip around the county, they had another chance encounter, this time with an Englishwoman who told them of a cottage on the market near Kilfenora. She took them to see it "and we immediately loved it and its location", says Roswald. "It was secluded and surrounded by trees."

The stone-built cottage, dating back to the 1800s situated down a quiet boreen, had been owned by a bookkeeper from Ennis who had started to restore it. Having bought it, Roswald and her husband decided their first priority was to create a studio extension and to slate the roof as the thatch was in bad condition. It took her husband and father-in-law several years to get the cottage in shape over a series of summers while the couple lived in the annexe. “I was going to print my own fabric and extend the house with a view to living there full time,” she remembers. “But suddenly there were so many opportunities in London that I couldn’t refuse and our business snowballed.”

0 of 4

Print studio

Instead the cottage became their summer home and a place where Roswald used the print studio for sampling for many years while their children grew up and her business thrived. The family could leave London Stansted in the morning for Shannon and be at the cottage within four hours, the house being less than an hour’s drive from the airport and only 3km from Kilfenora. “I wanted it to feel cosy and everything you would imagine a country cottage to be and also to be able to cater for visitors,” she says. All the fabrics and the curtains, for instance, are her own.

Now the house is for sale because the couple and their four children have moved to Whitby in Yorkshire, having sold their flat in the east end of London. “There is no point in swapping what we have here (in Whitby) for what we had there,” she says, adding that the surfing on which she and her kids had become “hooked” in Clare “one of the best surf locations in the world, is not as good here and transport to Ireland is now not so easy from here”.

The cottage stands on three acres and is on the market with Vaughan Hannon auctioneers in Ennistymon for €225,000. “It would appeal to someone in London looking for a country home in Ireland because of the easy access,” says Roswald.

She now mostly concentrates on interior design and works for amongst others Durkan builders in London on their new developments while her husband has set up a specialist coffee company in their south Yorkshire area.

The accommodation consists of three bedrooms with loft overhead (with one bedroom en suite), bathroom, kitchen/diningroom and livingroom. Outside, guests have a separate kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and living/diningroom with a solid fuel stove. The extensive workshop/studio could be converted into a separate apartment or playroom (subject to planning) and there’s also the advantage of a big double garage. The entire property also has business potential for other pursuits such as painting or crafts or might even appeal to another fashion designer. vaughanhannon.ie