‘One of my friends said, “Are you conscious of the fact that there’s virtually an altar to Richard in the hall?”’
competitive. “I always advise women not to ask their boss for a raise until 5pm when his testosterone has started to wane a bit; never have team meetings with men in the morning because their testosterone is through the roof,” Norah says with a laugh.
Girls have finer motor skills and learn very early to sit quietly, to be perfectly good, and boys learn to roar through school, to take knocks in their stride. “Psychologist Carol Dweck said if life was one long school report, women would be the rulers of the world, but in the workplace that good-girl quality doesn’t hold sway,” Norah says.
What all the research boils down to is confidence — women, according to Norah, have oodles of competence but they lack confidence. So part of Planet Woman is telling powerful women’s stories to inspire those of us who are starting out. “For every woman who makes it to the top, there are nine who don’t,” says Norah, adding, “not having confidence is not a life-long condition; you can change your brain”.
Planet Woman is, she says, “Netflix for women. It’s full of powerful vignettes, cartoons, a lot of animation, snackables [brief content], podcasts it’s all digital.”
Norah would be the first to admit that some of her projects over the last five years were devised to take her mind off the grief in the aftermath of Richard’s death; but there was one project she found hard to undertake, and that was the house. “Richard and I didn’t have enough time in this house to create happy memories, and I was too grief-stricken after he died to create the happy memories,” she says sadly.
Norah and Richard had bought the house in 2004 and had done a major job in 2010. It’s a Victorian villa-style home, and they added a big open-plan kitchen/dining/living space, with glass expanses opening onto the courtyards. They also added big bathrooms. Friend and interior designer Kari Rocca helped Norah with the colour schemes and finishes — between Norah’s vision and Kari’s experience and flair in the area of interiors, they turned the house into a delightful home.
However, when Richard died, Norah’s love of her home was tinged with sadness. “I used to lie in bed, thinking, ‘This is where Richard took his dying breath’. It took me a long time to even move his portrait from the kitchen to the hall. I used to have coffee with the portrait every day, until my mum said to me: ‘Would you not put that in the hall? When you need to see him, go and spend time with him’, but I had a mausoleum constructed to him.
“One of my friends said, ‘Are you conscious of the fact that there’s virtually an altar to Richard in the hall?’ There were tons of photos of him,” Norah reflects. “There were also areas in the house that I couldn’t face. My bedroom was a big one. I ordered a new bed around year three, and then I started to think I could change the energy in the house.”
She recently took stock of the whole house and decided to give it an overhaul. With the help of Emma Power of House & Garden Furnishings, she changed many of her colour schemes, making them, lighter, brighter and more feminine. She also had a lot of the dark furniture sprayed in soft creamy shades, and she added glitter and glitz with textiles by Aoife Mullane. All in all, she made the house more of a fun space, and so elegant that it recently won Celebrity Home Of The Year on RTE.
She’s also opted to display more prominently the fabulous collection of paintings which she and Richard had built up over the years, as well as her collection of elephants, and the first editions of important literary works that she and Richard had given each other as gifts — all of the memorabilia that make a house a home.
“I accept that a house is just bricks and mortar, an inanimate object, but there’s something about a place that can make you feel joyful or sad. I can honestly say now that I love my house.” Planet Woman will be launched on January 31, see planetwoman.ie Norah’s next Women’s Academy will take place at the RDS on March 24. To book tickets, see irishtatleracademy.com