The Store Yard in Portlaoise is a home interiors treasure

Carol O’Callaghan went in search of a cup of coffee off the M1 and discovered home interiors treasure.

Every so often a recession success story pops up and sometimes in unexpected places, like driving between Cork and Dublin when a coffee craving that can’t wait to be sated takes you veering off in the direction of Portlaoise.

Great surprises happen in the world of interiors, and for me it was seeing a sign for The Store Yard, while looking for that very caffeine hit, prompting a memory of having been there about eight years ago when owner, ex-builder David Keane, had been in business for two years, selling an eclectic selection of architectural and home interiors salvage, from sculptures and country-house wooden panels to furniture and kitchenalia.

A story he told me then sprang to mind and sums up the lure of this place: It tells of a woman who came looking for a Belfast sink but left with a number of hatboxes from the 1920s and ’30s — with hats inside — wondering how she’d explain to her husband where the sink budget had gone.

“It still happens,” says Keane.

“We get women in looking for period curtains or a door knocker and they leave with a fur coat.”

A Regency fire surround, vintage pub seats and a kitchen larder cupboard complete with a ventilated ‘safe’ section on top for milk, meat and butter, show some of the variety on sale at The Store Yard.

For Keane, the business is clearly a labour of love, and comes from a lifelong appreciation of houses and interiors, and collecting what he calls, “antiques and architectural stuff”, until the building trade went into free fall 10 years ago, and gave him the nudge to sell some of what he had collected — and to find more.

Starting out with three staff members and opening just three days a week, the business now has nine staff and includes his 84-year-old godfather who is kept busy polishing up furniture.

Expansion is ongoing, not only of the premises, but in the development of the shop concept where a restaurant coaxes weary motorway travellers in for a bite to eat and, very often, a purchase too.

“Men who come in for lunch say they won’t tell their wives about us because of what they’d spend here,” quips Keane.

Upstairs he’s created an 18th-century-style room with panelling salvaged from a country house with a chimney piece and Georgian windows, and painted with his own paint range. The room is now hired out for meetings and events.

Vintage hydrants converted into lamp bases can be an eclectic addition to a contemporary interior. Gilt-finished armchairs and statuesque glass-front bookcases are on offer alongside three-leg artisan stools and stone plant urns for outdoor use.

Such is the extent of their stock and their ability to source more, they are now the go-to shop when film and television drama producers want to fill their sets with authentic interiors.

David hires out stock, with a truckload currently on its way to Hungary for a new production, while other truckloads have already appeared in the prequel to Peter Pan and in Penny Dreadful.

Right now if you were to walk through the shop, expect to find gilt furniture, leather chairs with the patina of age, sculpture, urns, rugs, wooden panelling, doors, and architraves which are part of an inexhaustible list, most of which are sourced in Ireland, often from executor sales and houses being dismantled because they’ve fallen into bad repair.

“We’re looking for unusual things, like you’d find in the basement and attic,” says Keane. “We take a lot of the larger stuff antique dealers wouldn’t be interested in.”

There’s equal variety in the shoppers, among them a bride looking for old-fashioned marmalade jars to use as vases at her wedding and celebrities including the late Seve Ballesteros, who bought furniture for his house in Spain: Some of his friends followed suit, apparently.

Leather fireside chairs and Victorian side table are styled to create a room set at The Store Yard.

Currently, Keane says his favourite item in the shop is a little 18th-century Italian sculpture probably brought back from a grand tour by a young man of means. It prompts the question, what’s the price range?

“At the moment we have a pair of 18th-century limestone urns bought from a country house,” he says.

“Each one was sculpted from a single block of stone and cost €12,000 a pair, but we have decorative plates from €5.”

Like interiors, in general, there are trends in salvage.

“Taxidermy is very popular,” he says, “especially the Victorian period, but it’s the unusual exotic birds and animals that people want, not your foxes.”

The Store Yard is clearly a place where you could lose yourself for hours, and unless you keep your wallet under control, possibly your shirt too.