Cottage Charm

Most people do their backpacking tour in their twenties, but Patrick and wife Ros left America at forty to spend 18 months travelling around India, Thailand, Indonesia and Africa, before returning to Patrick’s native Ireland to start a family.

Patrick, a native of Ennis, had met Ros, who is from Leeds, in New York City in 1982, on his way to an exhibition of his paintings in Boston; he moved to New York shortly afterwards and they were married in 1984. The couple lived in New York for six years, Patrick supporting his art studio by working as a banquet chef, Ros was working as a fashion designer for Liz Claiborne, then they moved to LA, living first on the beach in Santa Monica, then in the Hollywood Hills. In 1992, they packed up their home, put everything in storage and went off for a trip of a lifetime.

Returning home, they lived in a rented home in Galway, where their eldest son Liam was born in 1995 and then started the search for a permanent home. ‘In the nineties, we found ourselves in competition with many German, French and Dutch buyers looking for a holiday home in Galway, and the price of cottages was quite high,’ says Patrick. ‘We started to look at Wicklow instead.’

Read more in the June issue…