Interior Designer/Interior Architect - all levels

Ruumi Studio is an architecture and interior design practice with studios in Dublin and Manchester, and a presence in London.

We began in early 2026 as a spin-out from an international real estate firm, and we brought our live portfolio and our design IP with us. It meant we skipped the year most new practices spend chasing work. We opened with a full order book and it has stayed full. In our first year we have delivered over 250,000 sq ft and been nominated for four awards so far this year.

Around half our work is commercial fit-out. A quarter is heritage and deep retrofit. The balance runs across aviation, industrial and workplace. The interiors work here is not decoration applied at the end of an architectural process. It is the project.

There are six of us and we want to grow by two or three, so this is an open call at middleweight, senior and associate level rather than a single vacancy.

We own a furniture dealership. This changes the job.

Indi is our furniture dealership, and it sits inside the group. We hold the manufacturer relationships directly, on our own terms, with the trading account in our name.

For a designer, that means several things that are unusual in this market. You can specify having actually sat in the thing. You can get a sample in the studio in days rather than negotiating with somebody else’s rep. You can hold a real conversation about lead time, price and substitution at the point of specification instead of discovering the problem at tender. And when a client’s budget moves, you have commercial room to move with it rather than starting the schedule again.

The obvious question is whether that means you will be pushed to specify in-group product. No. The dealership serves the design work, not the other way round. If the right answer is a manufacturer we do not represent, we specify it. A practice that lets the trading account drive the specification is not a design practice, it is a sales operation with drawings.

Lad Lane

We move into a new studio on Lad Lane in September. Two floors of a self-contained mews, with the Indi showroom on the ground floor. Your samples and your specification library will be one staircase away, and you will have a hand in what goes into the space.

We designed it ourselves, which seemed like the minimum standard for a practice that spends its days telling other organisations how their workplace should perform. It is not, on the evidence of visiting our competitors, an industry norm.

The nine-day fortnight

Every second Friday off, from your first day. Not a pilot, not something you earn after probation.

The reasoning is unromantic. This industry has a well-documented habit of consuming people at exactly the point they become properly good at the job. We would rather not, and then congratulate ourselves on the overtime.

What we ask for

Two things, and neither is negotiable.

Revit proficiency. Not “familiar with”. If your workflow is currently SketchUp and hope, this is not the right role. You can model, detail and coordinate without somebody standing behind you.

An inquisitive mind. The sort of person who disappears down a rabbit hole on a Friday afternoon and comes back knowing how something works, or why a material behaves the way it does.

That is the list. We will teach the rest.

What helps

• Commercial office, workplace or fit-out experience. It is the bulk of what we do.

• FF&E specification experience, and opinions about it. You will have more influence over specification here than at most practices, so bring some.

• You are already augmenting your design or documentation workflow with AI. We are building the practice around this rather than waiting to see how it settles.

• Comfort working with existing and historic building fabric. A quarter of our work involves buildings that push back.

• Professional membership is welcome but not required. There is no register for interior design in Ireland and we are not going to pretend there is a proxy for talent.

Pay

• Middleweight: €45,000 to €58,000

• Senior / Associate: €58,000 to €78,000

Bands are set by capability, not by years served. What matters is what you can run unsupervised, what you can specify with authority, and what you can hold in front of a client. Where you land in a band follows from that rather than from how comfortable you are asking. Some people find that conversation easy and some find it excruciating, and we would rather pay for the work than for the confidence.

What you get

• The nine-day fortnight, as above.

• Real responsibility on live projects, early.

• Direct access to the directors, and to the manufacturers.

• At senior and associate level, a defined leadership pathway that ends in a position of real responsibility across both the studio and the dealership. There is more than one way to build a career here and we would rather be explicit about that now.

• We submit our B Corp application in Q1 2027, once we have a full year of trading behind us. Not certified yet, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Practical

Lad Lane, Dublin 2. Hybrid, minimum three days a week in the studio.

Before you apply

At a practice this size you can find out exactly who you would be working with before you send anything. That is harder to do with a hundred-person studio, where you meet whoever is free on the day.

One of our co-founders was on Architecture Social recently, talking about how Ruumi is run, how we build around AI and what we actually look for when hiring. It was not recorded with recruitment in mind, which is rather the point.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7o1RoOQ1gXHaBPZi5Jftdd

To apply

CV and portfolio to admin@ruumi.studio. PDF, under 10MB, we are begging you.

Include a short paragraph on a material, a product or a specification decision you got wrong once, and what you do differently now. We read that before the covering letter.