Treasure island

Breakfast, bright and early at Strandfield café and farm shop in Dundalk, a few kilometres from the Republic of Ireland’s border with Northern Ireland. Over the first cup of the day’s conveyor belt of milky tea, monocle is being schooled in the improbable link between soccer and the isle’s high-end furniture design. Orior’s gregarious creative director, Ciarán McGuigan – dressed in a New York Mets cap, a neckerchief and a gilet – is explaining how the furniture brand’s current leadership all met on the football pitch at Savannah College of Art and Design in the US state of Georgia.

Sports scholarship student McGuigan, a right-footed centre back, became close friends with Jean Morana, Orior’s current head of design, as well as Jordan Trinci-Lyne, a former semi-professional striker from Cheshire who is now managing director, and group coo Richard Langthorne. “I realised that my [sporting] career wasn’t going to go anywhere,” says McGuigan, who studied film and TV, and had a spell as a college soccer coach. “But I fell in love with Savannah.” The friends, mostly hailing from Europe, would go on to forge the ambitious mindset that Orior has today.

McGuigan, now in his mid-thirties, left his football career behind when he took over the Orior family business from his parents, Brian and Rosie, in 2013 – though they remain heavily involved. The furniture company had been ticking along, servicing an Irish clientele, without setting the world alight. McGuire knew that Orior had the potential to be much more and reoriented it, highlighting the craft of the Irish makers who work on its pieces, which range from sofas and credenzas to coffee tables and vases.

Orior has a great origin story. Brian and Rosie, Irish Catholics born on different sides of the border, decided to leave in the 1970s during the worst years of sectarian violence, and moved to Copenhagen. They did multiple jobs, cleaning hotels as well as working at a fast-food restaurant opposite the Tivoli Gardens theme park. It was during their stay that Brian, who studied upholstery at school, fell in love with furniture.

When the couple returned to Ireland, they were in no doubt about what to do with the money that they had saved during their stay in Denmark. “There were no jobs here back then so we had to create our own,” says Brian, when monocle joins him for pizza and jet-black pints of Guinness at Dundalk’s Mo Chara pub, raising his voice to be heard over a pub quiz. Orior – named after the street that Brian grew up on – was established in 1979, with Brian at the helm designing and making pieces that had a mid-century feel. But it’s under his son’s leadership over the past decade that the business has thrived.

Inspired by the time that he had spent in Georgia, McGuigan decided that Orior needed to cross the pond. He moved its branding, design and sales leadership to New York, with manufacturing remaining in Ireland, and focused on selling Orior’s Irish heritage into the huge US consumer market. “When you think of furniture, Ireland doesn’t come to mind,” he says. “It’s pretty cool that Orior’s pieces are made here.” The US now accounts for 87 per cent of business, though the brand is now keen to start growing the Europeans side, which currently accounts for about 10 per cent of sales.

Over the two days that monocle spends with McGuire and Trinci-Lyne, who are on one of their regular visits from New York to check in with the team, we delve into the brand’s dna, criss-crossing the fluid Irish borderlands in the sunshine from the Republic into Northern Ireland, as euros switch to pounds and mobile phone coverage bounces between providers. When not in the Big Apple, McGuigan, his wife Logann and their young son live in a converted fishing hut in Omeath, on the edge of Carlingford Lough, which is south of the border. At lunchtime, we sit down for fish and chips at a pretty ivy-clad stone cottage in Newry, north of the border, where Brian and Rosie first lived when they set up Orior. Today their daughter Katie, who has recently returned from working in fashion in London, lives and works here. She is part of the family firm, designing rugs and doing other creative work.

Orior might have a fancy home in New York – including a showroom on Mercer Street in Soho, which opened in 2022 – but its soul is very much at the utilitarian headquarters and upholstery centre in Newry, where the bulk of Orior’s staff work. McGuigan has the business acumen and the confidence to focus on the US – and a raconteur’s ability to hold court – but this is where much of the brand’s hard graft takes place. When monocle visits, apprentices are stapling the wooden frames of sofas. Upstairs, leather is being carefully wrapped onto Bembo credenza parts, a beautiful piece with brass feet and handles.

It’s here, among the industry, that Brian comes every day, more comfortable putting his hands to work than being asked to articulate his backstory. He’s busy upholstering a low-backed, chunky leather Shanog sofa – his original design from 1979, brought back into the collection in 2019, the year that the brand relaunched. “Dad was in here at 07.00, dying to finish that sofa,” says Katie.

You might think that there might be some friction between the new guard, with their US education and cosmopolitan ways, and the old timers. Instead, it plays out in plenty of banter and mickey-taking. For McGuigan it’s all about the craic, an Irish word that is never far from anyone’s lips, meaning to have a laugh or a good time. He tells a story of going back to the factory from New York once and saying that he was going to get something out of the “trunk”, a pin-drop moment that caused the whole factory to stop at his Americanism. “The juxtaposition of the showroom in Soho and seeing where it’s made; it’s like chalk and cheese,” he says. “It’s refreshing coming back and having the piss taken out of me.”

McGuigan calls Orior a “family-and-friends company” revolving around his father, who trains everyone who passes through the Newry doors and, according to his son, is still the brand’s “north star”. There are workers hailing from 12 families here, from a total of some 65, and trying to work out who is related to whom is a dizzying exercise. We bump into warm and welcoming Aunt Gertrude, a seamstress, in the warehouse’s kitchen and later Uncle Pete, who is head of Irish sales. Brian’s neighbour, Pedar Jackson, has worked in upholstery for more than 40 years and his son Neil has also joined the company.

When an Orior delivery van arrives, McGuigan jumps up into the cab and starts bantering with driver Shane (whose brother, Harry, handles installations), a rolled-up cigarette dangling from his lips. The Newry complex is also home to Orior’s original showroom, where it’s possible to see the evolution of the brand. There are Brian’s mid-century-inspired archive pieces, which have been given a contemporary tweak, such as the Mozart chair that now has thicker wooden legs and a cross-stitch detail in the middle of the upholstery. And there are more recent releases, such as the Corca table – a combination of a three-legged cast-bronze body and a round crystal top – and the solid-stone Marmar coffee table. These newer pieces wouldn’t have been possible without a network of craftspeople from across the isle. McGuigan calls these makers “beyond important”.

A case in point is Alan McConnell, who is based a short drive from the factory and walks out to meet us with his German shepherd, Layla, in tow. McConnell presides over a business started by his grandfather more than 60 years ago, which specialises in working with natural stone (there are huge cutting wheels with sharp teeth inside his factory). S McConnell & Sons’ normal fare is anything from building façades to headstones, so working with an Irish furniture brand has been somewhat of a departure. “There’s no room for error and it has to be top-notch,” he says. “When you see the finished product, there’s a certain amount of pride.” When monocle visits McConnell’s factory, his colleagues are sanding down Orior’s curvaceous Umber tabletop and starting to cut the four tear-drop-like table legs for the Easca coffee table, a job that takes about eight hours. The coffee table comes in one of Orior’s signature stones: multi-hued Irish green marble that is extracted in Galway, on the Republic of Ireland’s western coast. “Carrara marble from Italy is 200 million years old,” says McGuigan. “But this stone is 850 million.”

There are also makers further afield. In Cork, a four-hour drive south of Newry, father and son Mick and Darragh Wilkins are part of a crew of makers who have been essential to Orior’s recent evolution. The duo are artisans in the truest sense of the word – they don’t have a website and rely on word of mouth. They work in a former farmstead in Kilnaglery, where they run a small bronze foundry out of an A-framed barn.

“A lot of learning the craft was by trial and error,” says Darragh, as he pulls a visor down over his face. They are working on Orior’s Corca side table, which is cast in five parts. It’s a complicated process that involves a mould made from resin and sand, covered in graphite and alcohol to protect it from the orange molten bronze being carefully poured at a temperature of 1,150c. Darragh says that McGuigan just “showed up at the door one day” and that was the start of the relationship. In fact, monocle fails to find anyone who is yet to be won over by the Orior creative director’s effervescence and enthusiasm; he’s clearly up for the craic but tenacious enough to not take no for an answer. Glass sculptor Eoin Turner, whose studio is located a short drive from the Wilkins’ workshop, confesses happily that the second time McGuigan came to try to convince him to work with the brand he brought “a very comfortable carrot” in the form of an Orior sofa.

Turner, a colourful character who studied fine art and worked as a fisherman, marches around the studio he shares with his wife, Lorraine, as he shows us around. For Orior he makes the Easca and Corca tabletops using recycled Irish crystal that gets melted down, reformed and fired in a huge kiln. “It has unique air bubbles in it,” says Turner, running his hands over the Easca’s surface, which has a resin-like feel to it.

The sculptor has recently started his own foundry and is clearly important to Orior’s future as the brand continues to push the boundaries of Irish craftmanship while preserving traditional techniques. McGuigan calls Turner a “mentor” and part of the firm’s ambition is to open a large new factory, by 2027 or 2028, in the hope of bringing makers like Turner in-house and have them train new talent. It will be a big investment and all part of Orior’s continued drive to make itself an established international brand and put Irish furniture on the map.

Orior is in the lucky position of being part of a larger group, which means that some of its outgoings can be offset against the success of its less sexy contract-furniture operation. But as McGuigan says, Orior is “the jewel in the crown” that has the potential to grow its catalogue and move in new directions.

monocle stops with McGuigan and Trinci-Lyne for one last pint of Guinness and something to eat before heading to the airport. The 12 prototypes that the brand is set to work on this year are discussed, with talk of adding beds and mirrors to the line-up. “We’re in a good spot right now,” says Trinci-Lyne, taking a sip of his pint. It’s hard to disagree. — L
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