A Sense of Place
Jando designer Owen McLoughlin pens a tribute to Ireland and the landmarks we love
Between lockdown and staycations, many of us are rediscovering our localities this summer. For the husband and wife team behind Jando designs — whose distinctive prints hang in homes across the country — an appreciation of what’s on our doorstep goes right to the heart of their business. Here, Owen McLoughlin celebrates those special places that connect us to Ireland, and to each other...
The song we played for our first dance at our wedding was This Must be the Place by Talking Heads, a song about the concept of home, finding a home, feeling at home, arriving in a place of openness and honesty with someone and not knowing how you got there. It is as significant to us now as it was then.
Even though we got engaged and, later, married in New York, we simply wouldn’t live anywhere else but Ireland. We love this place, the good and the bad. It has given us both roots and wings.
Shortly after our wedding, in the height of the 2015 recession, Julie stumbled upon a series of screenprints I had been working on in my spare time. She instantly fell in love with them and decided to approach several retailers, who wanted to stock the entire collection immediately.
I was flabbergasted but, like us, they understood that even though the country felt bleak in that moment, there was still so much to be proud of and to celebrate.
Our Jando Design Landmark Series was the first collection that we created as a direct response to this, and so it holds an incredibly special place in our hearts.
Having lived in Dublin for nearly 20 years, we understood the energy that ran through the city and wanted to celebrate the bright, exciting and modern country Ireland was and continues to be.
We wanted to place an emphasis on the rich history and
culture that Ireland has, and used our bold colourways to represent the opportunities and hope that Dublin holds for many people.
The first few years, we juggled full-time work with Jando before I took the leap in 2017, leaving my job in finance to focus fully on our business and the creative output. Though Julie shares my artistic tendencies, she has a business mind that I don’t and so is central to the progression and success of Jando. She sees opportunities in creative endeavours that before then I had never believed were anything more than a hobby. She inspires me hugely — as does my uncle, an architect with an infectious enthusiasm for his work.
Our work is all about connecting people, so whether that’s people to places, or customers to suppliers, connection is the heart of it all. From the outset, all of our materials have been sourced from Irish suppliers. We wanted our business to be a support for others.
So you see, Jando wasn’t born out of commercial necessity, it came from a place of genuine affection and love, that feeling only an Irish person can know when you are flying back into Dublin and you see those two striped chimneys — you belong, you’re home.
Back in 2002, we were having dinner in Smithfield and Julie asked me, “If you could buy a property anywhere in Dublin, where would you buy?” I remember answering without hesitation, Smithfield. Fifteen years later, we would end up buying our first home there. That community spirit had always been missing elsewhere and it provided us with that deep sense of belonging that we had both been looking for.
Our favourite stroll from home is along the Great South Wall, and we knew that even before the lockdown was introduced it would be a while before we’d be able to visit again. We could see the Poolbeg chimneys from our balcony in Smithfield. They were so close but yet so far away, and we knew that if we were feeling this way, so were so many others. It was from this that #LoveWhereYouLive was born — a social media campaign where hundreds shared their stories, their longings and their ‘places’ (see panel, right). We, in turn, set about capturing and commemorating our favourite tales. It kept us connected, creative and relevant.
In many ways, the aim of our work is to simply reawaken a love affair with the architecture that many of us to take for granted in our everyday lives. We are amazed at how often our work has altered people’s perceptions of the buildings they might walk by countless times a week and say they never noticed.
They sometimes don’t realise they have a connection with the building until they see one of our prints. There is a tactility to architecture that joins us together and links us to our mutual history.
So, you could say our work comes from a very sentimental place — a place of genuine admiration and love for where we live and that’s carried across in our work and into people’s homes and hearts.
See jandodesign.com
“Jando wasn’t born out of commercial necessity, it came from a place of genuine affection and love”