City Sinners
When you step into Kevin Powell’s Temple Bar apartment, what’s immediately astonishing is just how much stuff he has managed to fit inside. If it weren’t so meticulously organised you might feel a bit overwhelmed by the sheer volume of curios that inhabit this surprisingly large space. Powell moved in here a little over five years ago, firstly sharing the flat with a friend before inviting his girlfriend and business partner Robin Hoshino to move in with him two years ago. The place is inauspiciously located directly over Sin nightclub, which has led to cheaper rent, an agreement of free entry and drinks into said nightclub (which is rarely redeemed) and a reduced rental rate for people who stay in their spare room through Airbnb when it hits the weekend.
Over the past few years, Kev has been using the apartment as a means of generating income in various ways. Most notable are his weekly supper clubs, under the name of News of the Curd, which have seen people from all walks of life sit together at his table while he cooks menus based on locally sourced ingredients. Over time this has evolved into food consultancy work and running pop-up events (under the moniker Gruel Guerrilla) with Kev originally using his apartment as a base point for a lot of his cooking projects. ‘This oven’s held up with a brick,’ he motioned at a well-worn hob as the kettle began to whistle. ‘We once cooked this absolutely giant pot of food on top of the four rings of the hob and it buckled under the weight of it and melted the timer of the oven. My poor domestic kitchen couldn’t take my commercial enterprise and that’s when we realised that we needed to take our work out of the home.’
The overarching theme of the apartment itself definitely lies with food. Giant jars of mysterious entities pickling greet you at the door, and the main dividing wall in the kitchen-cum-living room is adorned with hundreds of recipe tomes, all organised into different types of cuisine. Even the cupboards, which Kev added himself, are made of old wine boxes. There are more types of tea than I’ve ever seen – outside of Wall & Keogh – and Kev has even managed to cultivate a roof garden on the next floor, featuring lots of fanciful delights like edible flowers (that taste like sweet cucumber) and tiny, white, wild strawberries that pack twice the punch of their typical counterparts.
However, the apartment is not just a singular paean to the culinary world, every spare inch of spare space here is filled with art (some of it by Robin), eccentric items like a 30-piece Russian doll that cost more than a trip to Russia itself, and a huge stash of records that he inherited from his parents. ‘My Dad and my Mam were punks when they were younger and have this amazing record collection. It always ends up being a talking point for people who come to the dinners, asking me why I have things like Do the Bartman on vinyl.’ Everywhere you turn it seems like a story or a factoid is lying in wait to be examined and explained. For Kev, this represents the remnants of his family home combined with hundreds of collected treasures and references to travels. It feels as though many more than five years has been compressed into four rooms, which kind of makes sense when he explains that someone taking the census informed him that the building itself is pre-1919.
The whole feeling of the apartment is homely and full of character, which sits in stark contrast with Mathieu’s uber minimalist and flashy penthouse. It would be impossible to rent Kev’s entire apartment and feel like you had the run of the place, as his taste and presence emanate from every corner of the place. That said, it’s exactly this experience that draws people in, and as Kev points out: ‘For nearly a year it financially supported me, and it’s kind of impressive when your own apartment is making more money than you are.’ That said, he’s now finding himself working more and more out of the home on projects across the country and, now that winter is coming, he’s going to keep the place to himself and take his spare room off Airbnb for a few months.
