“I NEVER THOUGHT I’d actually live in Dublin again,” the photographer Simon Watson says. “I really didn’t.” We are in the spare, sunny kitchen of his red brick house in Monkstown, just outside the Irish capital, where Watson, 49, has lived with his family since 2011. A few years ago, you could still buy power tools and excavators on the main street, he says wistfully, but now it’s populated by florists and coffee shops. Still, there’s no diminishing the allure of his particular domestic setting: a garden square, a house filled with light, a view of the sea.
Watson left his native city in 1989 as a 19-year-old film-school dropout and would-be painter and eventually landed in New York. That was a time when you could turn up in Manhattan “without a bean in your pocket,” he says, and rent a two-bedroom apartment over Crosby Street in SoHo for $300 a month. Watson’s life story is full of such real-estate serendipity: He was the person who found a loft in NoHo just before it peaked in the mid-90s, or a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights in the early aughts, or a collection of buildings on a remote Sicilian island at the turn of the millennium. “I bought it for a farthing,” he’ll say, or, “It was a couple of trips to the A.T.M.”
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In the three decades since he left Ireland, Watson has become a prolific architectural and interiors photographer and has raised four children. His education has come from the places he’s gone and the people he’s met: “I consider myself an educated man because I’ve spent my life traveling around the world, seeing places and experiencing different cultures,” he says, “and it would be crazy to consider that it hasn’t had an impact on my own taste.” Though, he notes, it’s less that a particular location or design or item has influenced him; what shaped his aesthetic, rather, was the ease with which the people he photographed created and inhabited their spaces.
THE 4,000-SQUARE-FOOT Victorian where Watson lives with his wife, the 41-year-old artist Christine Lebeck Watson, and their two children, Matilda and Hugo, was built in the early 1860s. Many of the surrounding buildings were built earlier that century, in the Regency period, and some are even older than that: Their home is near a small lane off Monkstown Road, the city’s primary artery; directly across that thoroughfare is Montpelier Parade, a short row of Georgian houses that is one of the earliest terraces of that era in south Dublin. Just over 200 years ago, Monkstown was largely open countryside, with an occasional mansion. Soon after, it became a seaside village that Queen Victoria loved to visit during her reign. The Watson house was built by and for the Dockrell family, prominent Protestants whose ownership of building-supply shops made them a force in the construction of Victorian Dublin.
In keeping with its royal association, the streets between Monkstown Road and the coast are named after those in London’s Belgravia: The Watson house is on Eaton Square; Belgrave Square is next to it. But these calm and cozy garden plots resemble their namesakes in title only — five minutes’ walk away is not Hyde Park nor Buckingham Palace but the edge of the Irish Sea; a 15-minute drive will take you into the verdant Wicklow Mountains, inhabited since Neolithic times and now a national park. It is a genteel area that is in all directions close to nature and seems undecided as to whether it would rather be tame or wild.
This Victorian is where Watson has gathered his collection of objects. Whenever he goes somewhere for work, be it India or Egypt, he wanders into an antiques shop and asks, “Can you ship that to Dublin?” And this house is more densely packed, he says, than the one the family moved from in Brooklyn Heights. That’s hard to imagine, yet the interior feels more curated than crowded: In the downstairs living room, there’s a Shang dynasty bronze horse that was found in Shanghai, a 20th-century pencil portrait found on the Sicilian island of Filicudi, a textured terra-cotta cup from 300 B.C. found in Wuhan, China, and an 18th-century 3-by-5-foot oil painting Watson describes with faux grandeur as a “Raphael,” which he bought two decades ago in Rome. A dinosaurlike bone in the dining room that almost reaches Watson’s shoulder leans against a corner and is given no provenance other than a joke: “I had a hip transplant seven years ago — you should see the scar.” It’s actually a contemporary sculpture from 1997, “Untitled (Femur),” by the New York-based Israeli artist Michelle Segre. Scattered among these pieces are delicate works made by the couple — his small graphic paintings, inspired by 21st-century Belgian artists like Luc Tuymans and Michaël Borremans; one of her pale cyanotype photograms of a length of string.
The magpie way in which these things have been collected and arranged derives not just from Watson’s inclination toward composition (“I’m always, in my mind, framing,” he says) but also from his sociability and wit. A plaster head lies on its side on a platter, as if ready to be served; a disembodied stone hand greets you at the door. By creating collisions between both geography and time, the place is “layered,” as he puts it, “with my history.”
And yet the manner in which the family occupies the space owes a debt to Lebeck Watson’s inherent stillness. Nothing is messy, but everything is relaxed: When you enter a room, you might pause to glance at the novels and monographs or the works on the walls (the 2006 Paul Winstanley landscape above a fireplace, say, or the 1998 Carter Potter celluloid strips above the couple’s bed). The idea, however, is not to admire any given space but to take off your shoes and feel the thick cream Beni Ourain rug underfoot, or to pick up a book, settle into one of the bright-striped, antique-fabric-covered sofas and look out of the sash windows across the rose-filled garden to the sea.
“ONE CAN NEVER have too many living rooms,” Watson says self-mockingly, knowing it’s the kind of thing an Oscar Wilde character might say. He has just described his home as a three-bedroom house — there are, in fact, four; the small room belonging to 4-year-old Hugo has been carved out of 9-year-old Matilda’s — which leaves out the three living rooms and comically fails to render its volume over four stories. The entire parlor floor is open, from the sitting room at the front through the south-facing dining room and into the kitchen extension at the back. The next floor, arrived at by passing a higgledy-piggledy arrangement of classical plaster casts clustered in a pale gray-painted skylit stairwell, also has a double living room, hugging the stairs in an L-shape, with a grand piano on one side and oak bookcases on the other. On the floors above are the bedrooms — the couple’s is simply furnished, with layered rugs from decades’ worth of trips to Morocco, along with a Chinese lantern above a low bed — and a sage green bathroom with a free-standing bath and a walk-in shower, built out of a formerly unused bedroom.
The Watsons didn’t have to make any structural repairs to their home: The previous owners, who had bought the residence in the late ’80s, had done the major work of converting it back into a house from a nine-unit apartment building. Instead, the couple focused on renovating the ground floor and amplifying the natural light throughout: The kitchen, for instance, was a warren of four rooms until they turned it into a 30-by-13-foot gray box with a multi-paned industrial-style window across its back. That room now opens out onto a small garden that’s at the crossroads between Tunisia and the Tuileries: Verdigris wrought-iron chairs sit beneath a palm tree, surrounded by ferns, rosemary, lavender and Japanese maple trees.
Inside, the rooms are airy, high-ceilinged and bright; the neutral gray and cream walls are overlaid with art, books and textured fabrics. Woolen Atlas rugs with zigzagging lines and repeating geometric motifs — distinct in size and pattern but united by their salmon and tangerine hues — cover the floors in nearly every room: Watson used to sell them to friends and now keeps a pile under the stoop in the entrance and swaps them out frequently for a change of color and tone. “People can spill wine on them. Babies can turd on them. I don’t care,” he says. “In fact, I think it adds to it. I actually feel that way about my entire house.”
IT WAS LEBECK WATSON who convinced her husband to come home to Ireland. When he left 30 years ago, Ireland had felt “a bit gritty, a bit dilapidated.” Decades later, “Christine pointed out how beautiful parts of it are — and the quality of life is very high.” And so they returned. During the day, the couple works in their shared ground-floor studio, sometimes going for a stroll after they drop off the children at school in the morning, or having “elevenses” together (toast, marmalade, a big pot of tea). Most evenings at twilight, the family walks down to the coast together and has a dip in the Irish Sea. “Let’s be honest,” Watson says, “when you reach a certain age, quality of life is not the fact that I can go out to a fancy meal and bump into 10 people I know. There comes a time when you just want something a little quiet, a little more pleasant.”
Lebeck Watson, for her part, had grown up on Long Island and lived in New York her entire adult life. “When you’re there, you don’t think you can be anywhere else,” she says. But Watson grins. “You know,” he adds, “New York is not the center of the world.”