The Tattered Perfection of John Derian

Inspiration Wednesday with John Derian

My girlfriend Sarah and I took a ride out to the house. She had only seen it from the outside. I had not been out to the house for a couple of weeks. Dave has made a few trips moving things to storage, and to oversee the clearing of the yard of all the overgrowth (more about that later).

Every time I go inside the beautiful old house I am charmed by the light and the peeling paint and worn floors. Dave is gong to power wash the inside and outside of the house, to remove the whatever peeling paint comes off. No doubt latex paint has been applied over oil base, and a lot of it will be knocked off the walls. We've talked about leaving the walls in this distressed state, leaving the patina of time intact.

So the designer and shop keeper John Derian comes to mind. He embraces the artful tatter in both his city and country homes. His New York city store is a treasure trove and added inspiration for his particular point of view. I think our beach house could look very charming with a few Derian like touches.

I am inspired by John Derian - Tattered finishes, vintage and antique accessories, and specimens from nature

All of our walls are bead board so I can't do wallpaper, but I'm thinking of doing an all over stencil. I love the speckled spatter painted floor in this John Derian room. We are not going to strip our floors, but rather wire brush clean them and softly buff them. Maybe spatter paint might be something to do as well.

I love the floors left worn and in an original unfinished state

Note the Oriental rug - I can't wait to lay the ones down that Dave has

The distressed walls are perfection. And here's that spatter floor, that looks amazing with the Oriental rug.

I love how John Derian does bedrooms in his country house

We have lots of art to create interesting gallery walls

I have tons of shells and curiosities that I can hardly wait to use on out beach house

This dining area by John Derian is so inspiring

I'd love an old cast iron kitchen sink

There is a vintage cast iron bathtub in our beach house that I hope can be moved to my bathroom. The back of the house has to be dismantled and rebuilt. This is where the kitchen, laundry area, and second bathroom are located. When Dave puts it back together we are going to reconfigure things so that each bedroom has an en suite bathroom, and the kitchen is expanded to accommodate a nice dining table

Inspiration Wednesday

Inspiration Wednesday...
Every Wednesday I'll post about what inspires me
Ken Fulk inspires me... 

The first time I laid eyes on our beach house I was already mentally furnishing it. I started making floor plans and lists of things we would each bring from our edited possessions. Dave and I have different decorating styles, though we do have a love of old things in common. He never met a piece of vintage or antique brown furniture he hasn't dragged to his house in the past 25 years, and I proscribe to the Sister Parrish axiom that a room should never have more than two pieces of brown furniture. He likes white walls; I like color and pattern. Dave has suffered my doll house for nearly three years, living with my point of view. Now I want to combine our styles, use his beloved family furniture and his oriental rugs and lovely things.

Ken Fulk combines antique and vintage pieces. Dave has brown furniture and oriental rugs. When I see a room like this I know I can make it work and love it too. Our walls and ceilings are original bead board, and we plan to paint them white.

Our living room

Our living room - My lime green silk drapes on these windows!

Susanna Salk and Stacey Bewkes have one of my favorite blogs: Quintessence. Their "At Home With" tours are inspiring and personal. I particularly loved one they did about the Provincetown home of Ken Fulk. I used it as a jumping off point for a client's beach house I worked on a couple of years ago. I didn't want to do cutesy coastal. I wanted a collected look, like a sea captain bringing home treasures, or a sea cottage like the on in the old movie "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir".

This Ken Fulk entry hall is great. Ours is a center hall with an opportunity to use chests, tables, and maybe my French settee. It will be a gallery to display our too large art collection. It's painted yellow now, and maybe I'll do the yellow too.

This is the center hall in our house with the bead board painted yellow - I would choose a better yellow; I have a lovely red killim rug that was in Alberto's office that is now languishing in the attic. It would look great in this entry hall.

Ken Fulk gallery wall inspiration for our center hall

So now I have a chance to combine all the things Dave and I have into a really comfortable and cozy and unique space for the two of us. Each of us will have to let certain things go, but we plan to pass them on when we open a pop up shop at the beach once we're settled.

The Ken Fulk dining room has an incredible hand painted mural. We don't have a real dining room, but Dave has a lovely brown old round table that would fit in our planned large eat in kitchen.

Our kitchen - It will be reworked to make room for a dining table

Ken Fulk kitchen is so not generic or cookie cutter

Our kitchen even has an old stove like the one in the Ken Fulk kitchen

Ken Fulk kitchen

My mantra of art, books, flowers will be invoked. I look forward to marrying our possessions together. His grandmother's Governor Winthrop secretary and oriental rug with my lime green silk drapes. You get the idea. Our 1890 Queen Anne center hall cottage will lend itself nicely to it. I love what Ken Fulk did in Provincetown, combining vintage and antique and some modern things. I love his use of color. I love his art work and his sense of whimsy. He's quirky and stylish.

Brown furniture is growing on me

Dave has a brass bed he loves and after seeing what Ken Fulk did, I think it will be perfect for our new house

More brown furniture love

I will have to downsize my book collection

I love wallpaper but the bead board walls won't allow it

I can add print with fabric

One of our two bedrooms

Ken Fulk does great vintage bathrooms

Flowers and art forever

Quirky love

One of the two of our bathrooms has some nice old fixtures

It feels great to be blogging again and sharing with all my fellow decor mavens! You can now follow this blog. There's an email link on the right hand side...

Ken Fulk I love what you do1

Show Me the Money...

Things are moving ahead. Our offer as accepted and we close on July 17. Getting financing is always interesting, and in our case more so. We don't have deep pockets, and at our age 30 year mortgages are amusing at best. So a second mortgage was procured on my New Orleans house, so we can pay cash for the beach house. Dave's house is on the market, and mine will go on the market this week.

The death of Dave's favorite aunt slowed us down a bit. She was 96. A road trip to South Carolina to say farewell to her gave us plenty of time to talk and reflect on life. Even though it made the logistics of all of this more pressing, it was a welcome time together.

While looking for some legal documents buried in an under-counter space in my dining room, I came upon boxes and boxes of photographs that constitute my old portfolio of work for my defunct event design business that closed nearly 25 years ago. The great purge has to commence, and I am screwing up my courage to throw out these remnants and relics of my glory days in New York.

There are so many of the mixed emotions expected with this type of decision and move. My inner voice screams, "Are you nuts"? But nuts or not, events are propelling us forward.

We stopped at the beach house on our way home from South Carolina. The listing agent was there still showing it, as the official status is "pending and still showing". We were a little annoyed that he was showing "our house", and drove away to the ice cream parlor to cool our tempers. We went back, and they were gone. Who else but us would want this wreck? We walked the property and took some measurements in the 98 degrees heat. We talked about the things to do first. There's still a lot of overgrown trash trees and vines that need to be removed from the enormous yard and off the love shack (the additional small guest cottage on the property), and that will be the first thing to do.

The Love Shack, the guest cottage on the property

We also scoped out storage units. We will have to store the furniture we are bringing, and things we will sell in a vintage shop we plan to open, while the house is being renovated. If both our houses sell quickly we will have no place to live, another daunting prospect for sure. The plan is to get the 300 square foot Love Shack renovated for us to live in for the duration of the big house restoration. Time is not on our side. Dave has a major project he is working on in New Orleans that must be completed before he can start working on our little nest. 

Hello Again...

It's been over a decade since I blogged beyond picture collecting on Instagram. I'm not young. In fact I turn 70 in a few weeks. I was once told how you start a decade out is how that decade will go, so be in a good place in mind, body, and spirit.

So as I prepare for the next decade with my new life partner Dave, we have decided to make a huge change. He has been in New Orleans for 40 years, and I have been here for 20. And though it's daunting we have decided to sell our homes and move to the beach. It sounds glamorous, but the beach is in Mississippi a place we never dreamed of living. My girlhood fantasy was to grow old in Paris, sporting a Colette look and sipping champagne with young people in cafes.

So this is the beginning of a new saga, starting with the the house we found after looking at houses in Bay St. Louis for nearly three years. BSL is just 59 miles from New Orleans. It was pretty much wiped out by Hurricane Katrina, but has come back cuter than ever as an arty little town that New Orlenians have made their darling. Consequently real estate prices are high.

We found a wreck of a house built in 1890. We both love old houses. Dave is a contractor that only works on restoring old houses. The BSL house survived Katrina. The tin roof blew off but was restored. The property did not flood. It was one of three houses built around the same time on a very short street right across from an active railway track. In fact there are only three houses on this street. Let's just say it's not for everyone.

But we love it. It's just under 1500 square feet, a very simple Queen Anne cottage with a modest center hall. I always said I would only move again if it was to a center hall house. There's a mother-in-law shack at the back of the property.

It will mean a lot of downsizing and ridding of two households with lifetimes of possessions. Stay tuned for some really good tag sales.

Our first hurdle is financing in time to to make an offer. We are both debt free except for the mortgages we hold on our homes. But on paper no bank wants to loan us money because of our advanced age and modest incomes. So now we are pursuing a private investor to give me a bridge loan using my house as collateral until my house sells. The good news is my humble little piece of swamp has appreciated very nicely over the years.

So this is truly the beginning, starting with getting the money. Stay tuned for hopefully many more blog posts about Dave and Valorie's big adventure.

Just across from the front yard

Hello again - The real estate agent snapped this of me - Do I look happy hugging this old house?