Blending innovation with respect for tradition, Lucy Downes’ home and studio is replete with nods to the ethos that has driven the success of her brand, Sphere One.
photography Doreen Kilfeather
Many business owners might empathise with the feeling that your work is taking over your home, but for Lucy Downes, her brand Sphere One did literally usurp her house. “My parents built two houses at the back of their garden and sold them to my sister and myself,” she explains. “A few years after I started Sphere One, there were three of us working there in a small bedroom upstairs. The worst thing of all, when I got up on Saturday morning my eye would catch something that hadn’t been finished. So I decided to keep it as the business premises, and bought a little house on the other side of the city. I’m very happy to close the door at night.” The studio is suited to her work, with ample room to design, and adjust samples.“I’ll work on the mannequin, pinning things, but sometimes I go back to the knitting machine, and start with stitch development.” A glass dome above the stairs also acts like a light box: “It’s a great space for selecting colours,” Lucy explains.
Both her Ballsbridge studio and Dublin 7 home are imbued with Lucy’s innate eye for interesting finds and beautifully crafted design, something that’s also evident in her knitwear brand, a stalwart of the Irish fashion scene for 25 years now. Speaking to Lucy and looking through the treasures in her spaces, her creative, visual talent shines through, but it is clear also that she has a nose for the commercial aspect of the industry, a combination that undoubtedly has led to her success. Before studying fashion at NCAD, Lucy completed a business and economics degree at Trinity College Dublin, while gaining invaluable industry experience through a scholarship post-graduate course with Shima Seiki, Japanese knitwear machine makers, and an internship at DKNY that turned into working as a designer there.
When starting her own brand, Lucy decided to begin with knitwear as, unlike most clothing and accessories, you only need one machine to make it, and 25 years later, she’s still finding interesting things to explore within the medium. Her technical knowledge is evident from the way she talks about her creations, from the intricate design process to the respect she has for her materials. Buying the best cashmere available from Europe and Scotland, it’s sent to Kathmandu in Nepal where she works with producers skilled at detailing and hand-stitching.
“Some design brands use really high-end cashmere, but they knit it on an eight-gauge traditional machine, and it’s too loose for the cashmere,” Lucy explains, “so it doesn’t wear well. We knit it to a tension that was set up in Scotland back in the 1950s. The tighter you knit it, the better it will wear, but it uses more cashmere, so it tends to get expensive. In fact, if you’ve knitted it tighter, it often feels a bit harder in the beginning, not light and fluffy like loosely knit cashmere. But word of mouth gets around as people who bought our jumpers 20 years ago are still wearing them.”
We all know by now that buying quality items that will last is amongst the best ways to be a responsible consumer, but this sustainable ethos has been baked into Sphere One from the beginning, before it was a hot topic. “For my thesis in Trinity in 1989, I wrote about the economics of waste management,” Lucy says, “and I’m obsessed about omitting plastic, and generally not wasting things. The beauty of knitting is that you start with one bit of yarn, you knit back and forth, and you end with the same strand. There’s nothing left, unlike cutting a tailored piece with all the scraps, so that’s intrinsically beautiful.” She saves small ends of yarn in jars for colour references, and any leftover yarn at the end of a season is knitted into hats for a cancer charity.
Lucy jokes that this same unwillingness to waste things manifests itself in her home through a collection of things that she refuses to part with. A Victorian terrace that was extended with a dePaor architects design centred around a courtyard, it combines the original rooms with calm, clean spaces. “The rooms at the front are old, and kind of busy with antiques,” Lucy says. “I have crafts from Peru and Mexico, and since I was in NCAD I’ve bartered with artists, so the house is filled with paintings. I bartered a piece in my degree collection for a painting from a great family friend, Sarah Walker, and we’re still bartering nearly 30 years later.”
The house is also lush with plants, from the outdoor courtyard to a special “plant room” Lucy requested when designing the extension. “I have lots of indoor plants, and when I watered them, it would sometimes spill onto the wooden floor. We decided to make an indoor plant room that’s all soil, with granite stepping stones across it.” The natural world has been a great source of inspiration for Lucy over the years, with previous collections inspired by Wicklow, and Connemara shores. For this year’s autumn/winter collection, she was captivated by a deep blue she saw in performance artist Marina Abramovi?’s The Lovers. “This purpley blue against the landscape, it was just extraordinary,” Lucy says. “I tend to do a whole palette of neutrals, and then a particular colour of the season. This year, those blues were singing out to me. I was obsessed with making blue ‘stones’ from paper and glue, and I started seeing the colour everywhere.”
As well as her home being filled with a tapestry of items she’s picked up over the years, Lucy’s meticulous record-keeping means her studio is filled not only with samples of yarns they have used, but also notebooks of designs and sketches. It’s an approach that has allowed her to develop and revisit ideas from previous collections. Sphere One is a cumulation of Lucy’s expertise and experience, and this shows in everything they make. “I feel that every person who wears a piece of Sphere One is our most important person. Each piece needs to feel right, and fit nicely. It’s about respecting everyone who made it, from the people who combed the wool, to the spinners, to the dyers, to the makers, to us. It all has to be the best it can be.” sphereone.ie
This article originally appeared in the Autumn 2024 issue of IMAGE.
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