Eire Works

Designer Joseph Walsh is renowned the world over for his sophisticated, coiling art furniture. His creative impulses, it turns out, can all be traced back to his bucolic childhood home in Ireland.

- Gisela Williams

Joseph Walsh is only 38 and has already had a career to last several lifetimes. 

It all started in 1987, when the Irish designer was seven years old and moved to his family’s 150-acre farm in County Cork. On the sprawling property, hundreds of sheep grazed the fields, and the thatched-roof cottage where he lived with his grandfather had no running water or television. 

Walsh spent four years living on the farm, a time which had a lasting effect on him—so much so that he eventually found his way back, transforming his patrimony into the base of operations for his eponymous furniture business, Joseph Walsh Studio. 

Today, Walsh works on the bucolic property in the same way his grandfather did: slowly and with a devotional focus. Crossing craft making with art, he is known for his wonderfully complex, sculptural chairs and console tables of wood—sinuous forms that appear to be a futuristic twist on Art Nouveau. In recent years, he has landed a surfeit of impressive commissions, including a 21-foot-high bed of sculpted ash for the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s Chatsworth House and a four-ton green Connemara marble table that stands on one asymmetrical leg for a Diller Scofidio + Renfro–designed manse in New York’s Hamptons.