Dublin man finds true calling in life by restoring vintage phone boxes - Extra.ie (2024)

Menu

A Dublin man has found his calling in life — restoring vintage phone boxes.

Paul Murphy, 55, from Santry, in Dublin, used to work in the security industry until he made a late career change bringing Irish Telefón boxes back to life.

Although things had been going well with his work, he found after 30 years he was ‘sick of the corporate industry’ and was suffering from depression and anxiety at the time.

In 2016, with a bit of extra time on his hands, Paul started his first major restoration project when he bought a vintage phone box for €1,000 and spent two months restoring it in the garden of his Whitehall home.

‘Antique restoration and interiors became my thing,’ Paul said. ‘It motivated me and changed my life. I was born in the Sixties. Phone boxes were everywhere at that stage. They evoke memories of an era.’

The first Irish Telefón box was installed in Dublin in the early 1920s. They served as an important line of communication, seeing Ireland through decades of immigration, until the 1980s — when private telephones became more available.

The first phone box Paul restored was sold for €5,000 at auction and now sits in a private back garden in Dundalk.

Since then, he has restored five vintage phone boxes and is now in the process of starting up his own business in antique restoration and interiors, under the name of Phoneboxman.

One of his latest phone box restoration projects has gone to Kilmeague village in Co. Kildare.

The yellow and green concrete box will once again be an iconic landmark for the village and this time will be used to store a defibrillator inside.

Last December, it emerged that Ireland has only 456 remaining public pay phones — compared to almost 4,000 in 2008.

Share Now

Read More