Orla Kennedy, director of children’s museum Imaginosity, lives in a 1960s house in Blackrock with her husband Neil and children Conor and Jessie

How did you come to live here?

When I first saw this house I didn’t like it. We had lived in America for eight years – my husband Neil is American – and there, there are these big rooms and windows with a sense of space. During my student years in Ireland I lived in redbricks and thought that when I moved back here to live I would live in a redbrick.

Our move back to Ireland probably began when I was offered a job in Derry to work on a production of Uncle Vanyaby the Field Day Theatre Company in 1995. When we finished that production I was offered a job at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Monaghan and Neil got a job in Dún Laoghaire. He had to look for a house while I was in Monaghan. I would come down at weekends and would say, "here are four to look at". I worked in the arts and there was not a lot of money but prices had started climbing. We wanted to be near schools and a great neighbourhood – and this neighbourhood is lovely.

There was a caravan parked in front of the house – the owners were retirees who would go to Europe for four months in the winter. They had paved the front with grey flagstones and a bit of grass. It was a rainy February day and the aluminium windows looked dreary. But when we came inside I liked the house because it had been kept very well. The woman was very house proud and everything was clean. This house was built in 1964 for a different family experience. It was for big families, the room sizes are big but the bathroom is tiny.

Did you have to do much work on it?

I thought we could just make cosmetic changes but I didn’t realise just what ‘cosmetic’ could mean. The bumpy brown orange wallpaper must have been Superglued on because when we stripped it chunks of plaster came off too. There were 1960s orange and lime green carpets and other 1960s features: with some of them I thought, should I keep it or not? Does it have integrity or will it drive me nuts?

One 1960s thing we kept was the pantry. In the US we always had a pantry in the kitchen so we kept the one that was here, under the stairs. It’s great because you can see everything on the shelves but can shut the door.

We didn’t do anything for eight years in the kitchen but then I began going bananas. We put off doing it because we weren’t sure if we were staying in Ireland and then we said, will we wait until the kids are teens? The kitchen still had slidy chipboard cupboards and chocolate sundial tiles: everything was grim and dark. This used to be divided into a kitchen and sittingroom. When I felt the kitchen really, really had to go I knocked the wall down with Billy the builder from the Glen of Imaal, who a neighbour introduced me to. We hired a brace in Monkstown in case the wall was not load bearing.

What was it like when the wall came down?

It was such a relief, suddenly we had light. I put in oak floors and a moveable island for flexibility. Sometimes I sit at it, or at the counter, or at the table to eat dinner and breakfast. I like the idea of having different spaces in the same room. There’s a chair that Neil sits in to read the paper, a desk to put bits into and an armchair to sit on when you’re on the phone. There’s a real fire in here too so it can be really cosy in the winter.

The space is also divided by different Farrow Ball colours. The four pale and green shades complement each other very well and change with the changing light. I have a darker colour – Mouseback I think – where the sun hits the wall. The kitchen and dining room has double doors into each of the rooms beside it so in the summer the whole space can be opened out.

Where did you get the kitchen from?

The kitchen parts came from different places. The granite for the worktop came from Monaghan, because I felt the prices I’d been quoted nearby were way too expensive. I looked up companies online and faxed six of them with the measurements that the Ashgrove Panelling Centre gave me – they designed the kitchen (and have since closed). Three faxed back and this company was cheaper than some others by hundreds of euro. And they were great (although I can’t remember their name).

I got the wooden floor from Cavan, from a company recommended by a neighbour. I had looked in bigger suppliers here but it was cheaper. The guys were brilliant, they fitted the floor too. They came down from Cavan, worked a solid nine to 10-hour day and then went back to Cavan in the evenings.

We decided to go for a solid oak kitchen and stained it in a neutral colour. I felt that if we painted it you wouldn’t see the grain in the wood.

Where did you get your furniture?

After we’d done the kitchen a friend and I flew to Ikea in Glasgow and split the cost of shipping furniture back.

I like putting in red and green against the neutral background. I bought a lot of lights including a red lamp. Red is good: I have red bits everywhere although maybe in 2011 I will decide that lavender is good. I initially bought an armchair in white but last time I went to Ikea in Belfast I bought a red cover for it.

The table came from Meadows and Byrne and I had a glass cover cut for it, to protect it. The children have done a lot of art here. We brought the dining chairs back from Boston with us.

I love an American storybook pig called Olivia – who has wonderful adventures – and have a red bucket with her on it to put bits and pieces in.

The microwave is also behind a sliding door because it is essential but I don’t want to look at it.

When I was growing up my mother always had kitchen drawers with keys and everything in. I now have seven smaller kitchen drawers, one on top of the other, for all those things: waste bags, tea towel, all nice and full. The more drawers I have the more I fill.

I love this kitchen, it is the centre of this house, where I cook – I love to cook – and where we eat, talk, socialise, and do homework. It is where stories are told.

You also did the garden?

We did it twice. It had a concrete path up the middle and a big clothes line up on steel poles running right across the garden and there were cabbages and potatoes on one side.

We got rid of a glasshouse because it was blocking light into the kitchen and we didn’t grow enough in it to merit having it. The garden used to be on a steeper slope so we took away a lot of soil: over the roof and out.

At the end were old batteries and doors.

Recently we put in a circular path, seating areas and a treehouse.

We used to have grey granite slabs but they are so grim because of the rain here all the time so we put Indian sandstone in which is really bright but it doesn’t thrive in the Irish climate; it goes green in the rain.

The first time we did the garden it had children’s swings and slides in it but they have gone now the children are older.

But now you work with children?

I run Imaginosity, which is a combination of the words imagination and curiosity, in Sandyford. It’s a not-for-profit universal movement of children’s museums that began in Brooklyn 109 years ago. I would love to see a children’s museum in every major city. I took my two children to the Boston children’s museum when we lived there and when I came back to Ireland I had no place to bring the children on a wet Sunday.

I wished that there could be something like the Boston children’s museum here and now we’ve been open for 20 months.

They all follow the same premise that it is all about learning – through play – around children’s developmental milestones. No child is ever wrong. It is not wrong to take the bone from a skeleton leg and put it where the arm should be, although if you do put it in the right place it will sing to you.

Everyone has creativity in them, we are not like little boxes on the hillside.