I grew up in Co Kildare in a small village called Two Mile House. My parents built a lovely bungalow in a field on my grandparents’ farm so it was very rural – there were no other houses on our road. Today, I live in Waterloo in central London because I love the energy of city centres. I love the buzz and the excitement of them and that sense of the unknown. And I find cities really safe. Other people find them scary and dangerous, but I’d feel more nervous in the middle of the countryside.Now that I’m in my 40s, I enjoy escaping back to rural Kildare. The fresh air in Kildare is insane. There are certain smells that instantly remind me of home. There’s a lilac tree near my parents’ house, and whenever I catch the scent of lilac, I’m transported back there. When I was a child, my uncles would cut the field behind our house to make hay and they’d turn the hay to dry it. That smell – I’d like to create my own candle with that scent. I love that I can look up and see the stars from my parents’ house. My work ethic comes from my Dad and my creativity from my mother. Dad was a project manager for Oral-B and he was out of the house by ten past seven every morning, but he was always home for dinner, which I really liked. My mother gave up her career at the council to raise me and my two older brothers, Gary and Derek, but she was super-creative and had her own little side hustle. She set up her own company called Marjo Knits – Marjo is an amalgamation of my parents’ names Mary and Johnny – from the spare room, and I remember as a child drawing Marjo Knits signs and sticking them to the door so it looked like her office. When my brothers and I were teenagers, we’d be on the knitting machines making jumpers to help her out.Dad was very involved with the local GAA, and both my brothers were really good at underage football. I wasn’t. I played until I was about 10 or 11 and then I realised – no, it’s over for me, I’m really not good at this. It’s a running joke in our family that I have a county medal and my brothers don’t. I was on a team that won, although I in no way contributed to the win, but I still have the medal! My brothers were always outside playing football when we were kids. I was in a world of my own imagination. I remember once deciding to create my own mini-garden with a little yellow wall made from leftover bricks belonging to my parents’ house. My Dad made a gate for it and I created a little sign from plaster of Paris. I also made a pond using a basin, and I remember being in a garden centre in France and spotting a little toad-with-a-hole water feature and pleading with my parents to buy it for me. When we got home I hooked it up to a hose so water would pump into the pond. I planted a silver birch and an ash tree from seeds and they’re still there 30 years later, and huge![ Irishman takes top award in ‘interior design Oscars’Opens in new window ]At school I was a complete nerd. We were raised to be good – good in class, good at learning, good at exams. I didn’t love my teenage years though. I moved from an all-boys school in the countryside with a class of 15 and a total of probably 70 students to CBS in Naas, which had about 850 boys and girls. I didn’t fit in and I was struggling getting to know who I was. Being gay in Ireland in the ‘90s was difficult. I worried about disappointing my family, and I felt as if I couldn’t be gay and shouldn’t be gay. There was no real visibility at that time, so I really struggled for a while, but I also knew that I had to be who I was, so I came out quite young, at 17. My parents were, and are, beyond loving and supportive.It was really liberating going to DIT Dublin, now TU Dublin, to study interior architecture. I was free to just be me and to figure everything out. I was actually christened Shane, but when I moved to Dublin, I added the “y” and it became Shayne. That was me becoming who I felt I was. Twenty years later when I established my own interior design practice, Studio Shayne Brady, I asked myself, “Does the ‘y’ stay or go?” I kept it of course. But Dublin gave me a real chance to find my tribe and to feel okay. I loved Dublin and still do.[ Irish designer’s kink sex furniture raising eyebrows in LondonOpens in new window ]Irish people are notoriously bad at giving themselves credit, but I think co-founding my first company, Brady Williams, at 29, was brave. I think there is a kind of fearlessness in me – I know who and what I am and where I’m going. I’m lucky that my profession allows me to travel a lot. I’ve always gravitated to Miami and I’m setting up an office there. Miami is the next challenge, the next chapter. My mother always says, “What’s for you won’t pass you” and I think that’s a wonderful phrase. I try to live life by going with the flow – if you fight the waves you start to drown. In conversation with Marie Kelly