At Work With: ORIOR

Orior has always been a family business, but it was the pandemic that really brought it all back home to Newry, Northern Ireland. Ciarán McGuigan, the furniture brand’s creative director, had flown back from his base in New York in March 2020 to check out some prototypes at the factory. Katie Ann, his sister, who has her own fashion label, returned from London two days later. And then the world shut down.

It was “class” being back with the family, says Ciarán. “We appreciate it now because we aren’t teenagers being little shits.” The McGuigan family are lined up for our Zoom interview on one side of a dining table, Brian (their father) on the far left, followed by Ciarán, then Rosie (their mother) and Katie Ann. Their computer’s webcam is too narrow to take in this family portrait, so Ciarán spins the computer throughout the interview to face whoever is speaking. 

Their unexpected time together has led to all sorts of collaborations, he says, one of which is a handwoven rug collection, whose colors were inspired by their walks: the different blues of the locks on the river, the sky’s pinks and reds at sunset. They’ve been testing out new digitally printed fabrics, as well as fabrics woven from Donegal yarn, and wallpapers. And they’re looking at fresh ways to combine materials—marble, metal, leather, fabric, crystal. “You might think Irish design is diddly, diddly, diddly,” says Ciarán, conjuring a parochial picture. “You don’t necessarily think attitude.”

But “attitude” radiates from the brand’s creative output: Its campaign photos of deep, velvet chairs, sculptural marble tables and mid-century-inspired cabinets have the light and saturation seemingly turned up so that they glow in jewel tones. In the section of the Orior website that documents their clients, chic creative types gaze at the camera, lounging on the furniture. 

 The desire for this kind of design did not exist in Ireland when Brian and Rosie were growing up in the 1960s and ’70s. There were more pressing concerns. It was a bleak period politically—a time of violent conflicts between Irish nationalists, who wanted the six counties governed by the United Kingdom to be returned to the Irish republic, and the unionists, who wanted to keep their British identity. There were few job prospects during the Troubles. Brian, who grew up on Orior Road in Newry, left school at 15 and started working as an upholsterer in a factory. Soon after, he met Rosie at a rugby club just over the border in Dundalk.

Six or so months after they met, the couple left for Copenhagen in search of work. He was 18, she had just turned 17. They worked in fast-food restaurants and in hotels, window-shopping during their free time. There was all “this kind of color, design, clean lines,” Rosie recalls. Back in Ireland, everything was brown and gray; in Copenhagen, it was in technicolor—they would pick up or crawl under the furniture to see how it was made.

In 1979, when they had been in Copenhagen for almost three years, Brian felt the itch to go back to Newry and try his hand at making his own furniture, based on the Danish designs that had enthralled them. He set up Orior immediately, hiring his sister as a sewer, his brother to handle sales and the next-door neighbor he grew up with to help with reupholstery, which they did for local clients for most of the week to make ends meet. In the snippets of downtime he could find, Brian designed his own original pieces. “It allowed us to be more creative in a small way,” Brian says. Brian and Rosie established a storefront in Belfast for their tiny product line, but things were slow to pick up. Rosie says that it was so bad in those first years that had they put the furniture outside and tried to give it away, no one would’ve taken it. “Not in a month of Sundays could I have done what Dad had done back in the day,” Ciarán says. “I had no choice,” Brian counters. 

Working in Northern Ireland was dangerous: Brian recounts how one time, when he was moving some furniture with a van, British troops thought he was a paramilitary. It was also difficult to convince local manufacturers to supply smaller quantities to artisans, meaning Orior had to get materials from overseas. A large, naturally tanned bull hide from Scandinavia was made into Brian’s first design, the Shanog sofa. They worked with Kvadrat, the famous Danish fabric maker, back when they could only afford to put in tiny orders. At a Danish furniture exhibition, Rosie remembers the Kvadrat representative telling her encouragingly: “18 meters from you, 18 meters from the man in Hong Kong, 18 meters from somebody in Germany. It all goes into the one pot.” One English trader, by contrast, told them that the minimum order size was a thousand meters. 

“You might think Irish design is diddly, diddly, diddly. You don’t necessarily think attitude.”

Newry is a sizeable city, but surrounded by the natural beauty of the Mourne Mountains and the Ring of Gullion.