When I was a child of about 8 years old, a photo album someone had given me as a gift developed a tear on it’s cover.

To my amazement, when I looked closer I saw that, underneath the cover image, there was a selection of newspaper pages with Japanese print. I was fascinated by this discovery and felt I must be the only child in Tipperary with a real Japanese newspaper in my possession!.

Why this story in the introduction to my blog about Greenville, our home in Tipperary, Ireland’s midlands?

Maybe because I have always remembered my intense curiosity and excitement that day, in finding something that was not common, something from another culture and place, something different, that was very beautiful to my eyes. It was a piece of art.

My life, the career route I chose in studying Anthropology, and everything I have done to date – working with community development projects; event management; designing and running my cafe and fashion boutique ‘The Business’; bringing Greenville back to life as our home; writing this blog about the arts and food, and returning to study Art History, Collections and Curating at University College Dublin  –  have all been about seeking out or doing something, a little bit differently. Seeing the beautiful around us!

I think of Greenville as a place apart, a space that is colorful and interesting , my ancestral home, in the heart of Ireland.

Looking back, I never intended to base myself in rural Ireland, or indeed here at Killough. When I returned to Tipperary from NUIM Maynooth to write up my doctoral thesis in Cultural Anthropology, it was intended to be for a short while. But it was during that time that I visited my maternal grandparents’ home in Killough, and had a burning desire to bring it back to life.  Life takes its twists and turns and, well here I am, here we are.

Had I made different choices, I expect I would have settled in Paris, a city I loved when there as a young adult working as an au pair and studying. Or maybe Venice, had I known more about the artistic beauty of the city when I was younger.

In the posts that follow, I will go out and about in Tipperary and further afield, and write about art, fashion food and travel.

I hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Greenville, welcome to my world in Tipperary – my style.

Denise

Photo Credits

Several images used in the initial posts on this blog were taken either by Tom Doherty or Ramona Farrelly.  A huge thanks to them both for allowing me to reproduce their work.