Two months ago Ciaran and Olga Hogan opened their door to passers by – not just any old door: The Clockwork Door. Since then their “time-house” has seen all kinds of visitors, from students in need of a place to study on a Sunday to board game enthusiasts looking for somewhere to get together for an afternoon. Nestled above a Japanese restaurant on Merchant’s Quay, their business concept is a new one for Dublin: visitors purchase time, and the space and facilities the building has to offer are theirs to use for that time. The facilities include high-speed WiFi, a coffee machine, microwave, and a pantry stocked with biscuits and over 100 types of tea. We visited them to see how things had changed since September and what they are looking forward to working on now that the business has established itself.
Ciaran said that the thing that surprised them the most about how the space was being used was the amount of groups looking to have events there. Since its inception, there has been everything from film screenings to an Edgar Allan Poe night. Ciaran and Olga are currently organising three regular events themselves as well. Collaborative bomb-defusal game, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, is held on Wednesdays. Friday is Foreign Film Night, and on Sundays between 1-7pm it’s Boardgame Day, with a discounted admission rate of 3 euro per hour. All of these events are drop-ins, and open to everybody. They’re planning on adding loads of other stuff, like Artemis, to their line-up, so to keep up with any new activities check out their Facebook page!
Despite the success of these events, the primary purpose of the Clockwork Door has not changed – it is to cater for passers-by who are coming in to hang out, eat or study. The study room is something that he didn’t expect to be so popular – especially on the weekends. Public and college libraries often have very limited opening hours on weekends and holidays, so to students like ourselves it’s not surprising that people are relieved to find somewhere that’s open late almost every day of the year, with the quiet of a library and the facilities of a café!
One of the inspirations behind The Clockwork Door was Ciaran and Olga’s desire to see Dublin’s social scene expand to include events that were not fuelled by alcohol. The Clockwork Door is an alcohol-free space, and offering a complementary alternative to Dublin’s pub scene is one of the things the owners hope to achieve with it. The group ALT Events, who organise a variety of non-alcoholic social events around Dublin, recently held their “Catch Me If You Can” event at The Clockwork Door, and Ciaran cites that as one of his favourite moments of the last few months. At the event participants were split into runners and chasers, and given a map of locations to get to at various points around the city. To win the game, you had to reach the final destination, The Clockwork Door, without being caught. “We’re interested in providing a space for people who are doing creative things, things which you’re going to talk about for a whole lot longer than that night you went to the pub for a few pints”, he says. The Clockwork Door stays open a lot later than most coffee shops, til about 10pm, so it’s a good option for people who want to meet friends in the evening but don’t feel like a drink.
As I was leaving, Ciaran showed me some drawings, origami and a handwritten card that some of their customers had left behind after their visits, proudly pinned on the noticeboard. If you’re looking for a place to display your art, be it poetry, paintings or crafts, don’t be shy about dropping into them. They will offer discounts for donated artwork of any kind, and unusual or rare maps, which they collect and display on the walls of the front room. As Ciaran said, “we would rather get art than money from customers at this stage. We want to be able to look at someone’s novel in years to come, and say, they worked on the first draft of this at The Clockwork Door.” With the view over the Ha’Penny Bridge, the quiet, and the coffee, we wouldn’t be at all surprised if his prophecy comes true!
www.clockworkdoor.ie
www.facebook.com/theclockworkdoor
This article is sponsored by The Clockwork Door.
