The Bear necessities

DIY for most people means putting up a few shelves, but for Siobhan Lam it meant knocking walls and chimneys, installing bathrooms and laying floors. It also meant a whole new career in interiors

Jack And The Beanstalk, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, April and The Bear. No, that last one isn’t a well-known fairy tale, but were Siobhan Lam ever to write her own story, it would be the perfect title to encapsulate her journey from Kildare schoolgirl to successful interiors entrepreneur.

It’s also a great name for a shop, and indeed, it’s the name of Siobhan’s edgy new interiors store in Temple Bar. April and The Bear is a treasure trove of lighting, furnishings, and accessories for the home. The pretty brunette got into the business five years ago when she and her husband, Jamie Hughes, started buying furnishings for their own home. She started with an online store, which became so successful that she was able to open her gorgeous shop on Cow’s Lane in Dublin.

Siobhan, who was born in London and grew up in Prosperous in Co Kildare, had not been thinking of interiors as a career when she left school; her choice of degree was English and sociology.

“I started in UCD, then I transferred to NUI Maynooth, and finished my degree there,” she says. “I didn’t love UCD — it was too big; too daunting. You go to a lecture, you meet a lovely girl and you never see them again. It was enormous. I loved Maynooth — the campus is stunning; the lecturers were so passionate; it introduced me to the world of feminism, the sociology of the body. It was just a whole new world.” She adds with a laugh, “and I supposed I knuckled down a bit more.”

After college, Siobhan and one of her friends went to London for a while — the grand plan was to go into acting. “We were like, ‘We’re going to do it; we’re going to be actors!’ And we promptly started working as ushers in theatres,” she recalls with a smile.

She wasn’t afraid of the hard work involved in acting, but it was the fact that no matter how hard you grafted, there was a huge element of luck involved in getting parts that persuaded her to return to Dublin and do a post-grad in fashion buying. “I interned in Arnotts; they gave me a job when I graduated. I loved that it was a predominantly female workforce, and if they believed in you, they were incredibly supportive,” Siobhan says.

Siobhan was with Arnotts for three years and enjoyed fashion enormously. Then she and her husband Jamie, whom she met when they were 17 and at Bruce College together, decided to buy their first home, and it was around this time, while they were looking at houses, that her focus shifted from fashion to interiors.

“I switched from buying Vogue and Elle to buying interiors magazines. It became my one and only obsession. I love that interiors is not trend-driven in the same way as fashion. It’s more personal

— you’re creating a space for yourself and your family. You can introduce trends, but you don’t go, ‘Oh, this living room is so 2016’. Interiors is more considered. A lot of hopes are wrapped up in your home. You’re essentially building a dream,” the vivacious 30-something enthuses.

She and Jamie, who works in sales as well as being a musician, were lucky enough to find their dream home five years ago — a delightful terraced house in Portobello, which was built in 1910.

“We were looking for about two years and we came across this house. It was in three bedsits. It had been taken over by Nama and it did not look nice”