It sounds like the daftest thing to say but, sometimes, what’s outside a place to stay can seem almost more important than what’s inside a place to stay.
Take White Cottages, Jackie and Joe O’Connor’s gorgeous house in Skerries. The house is a peach and, if you stay here, you get the equivalent of a twofer: the house and its yummy design, and its views out across Dublin Bay. And those views, and the way in which the house has been cleverly designed to maximise them, are the secret.
For as you sit at the breakfast table, your gaze moves from the table to the table’s edge, to the window seat and its cushions, to the sea and the sea’s end at the horizon, to the sky and the clouds. The view is a still life, except it’s a moving life. And what White Cottages does, from almost all the rooms, is invite you to contemplate this vista.
You could open a Zen Buddhist Meditation centre here, no problem. But then, as you contemplate the outside, your gaze comes back inside, and the charms of the house form another enchantment: beautiful inside and out. Jackie is a painter, and it shows, everywhere: all is art.
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