Inside John Derian’s Enchanting Seaside Home in Cape Cod | Design Notes

I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do with the renovation. And when my friends came for Easter, they're like, we love that you're keeping these yellow walls and purple floors. And I was like, am I? And then I was like, I guess I am. I'm from Massachusetts. So as a kid, we came to the Cape for summers. In 1982, I worked here for the summer in an inn, and then I just kept coming back. I didn't come back for five years, and I was on Nantucket, and I came to visit a friend. It was like a rainy day, and this house had a for-sale sign on it. So I wasn't looking, and I hadn't been here in five years, and I thought, wow, what a great house. I guess I do have a thing for columns and sort of Greek Revival architecture. I just loved the setup, that it was still intact, that it had all this original detail. I do feel like, in a weird way, the house found me. The house was built in 1789 for a sea captain named Captain Small, and I'm the third owner. It went from his family to the other family in town, and then I got it from them. The wallpapers are probably mid-20th century, but they're so old-looking, and they look a little older than that. I decided to keep them just for the charm. Also, the floors are called the Cape Cod floor, which is, I think, like a faux stone thing. And then there's all these sort of funny sets of doors in the house, and the doors are very thin. For a little while, it was a rooming house. People could sort of stay in them. We eat in this room a lot, we play games in this room a lot. It's amazing how many people we can squeeze in here. We don't have A.C., but it's pretty breezy. It's well-heated, so in the winter it's warm, it's all-season. It's nice when the fires are going in the house, too. This room is the probably original room of the house that has the sort of fancier fireplace. The walls are covered in like a seashell and horsehair plaster. That was the combination that was most popular here in the Cape. And this whole wall, too, had wallpaper, but it was buckling, so we have what's behind all the walls and wallpapers is slatting. But it was kind of pretty, so we just left it. A lot of the rooms have these sort of double doors, but it is fun to have this because you can, you know, do what you want. Actually, these three pieces of furniture are pieces that I got in France that we then had copied, and I have a furniture line with Cisco Brothers that's all handmade in North Carolina. I don't really have any family history of interiors or antiques or anything. It's just kind of something I developed. My sister would take me to flea markets, and that's where I kind of got the bug. We lived in an old house growing up. Well, my dad basically, he lowered the ceilings and put paneling up and took out all the molding. But even as a kid, I was like, why are you taking that down? Somehow I became this person that likes old things, but doesn't really know how it happened. I was always crafting things, too. Crafting and collecting, and I'm still kind of crafting and collecting. And these are all funny, weird shell things. My sister was in Florida, and there's these Greek divers that harvest these vase sponges, which grow back, not hurting anyone. She sent me one, and that kind of led to me getting more sponges. And then the things that are over here on that table are kind of organic materials, but sailor-related. This is like a 19th century sailor's knot. This is a hand-forged chain. They're just sort of weird and wonderful things. These two paintings I got in Paris, they're 17th, 18th century, and the scale is so crazy. Like, who commissioned to have these giant portraits of pets made, but I'm happy to have them. What's great about this kitchen, and it was funny because I found this pretty fast, when I was thinking, what could I put in the middle of the room? When we have guests, it's fun because we can all be working and making things, or serving, and then inevitably we're always in the kitchen. So it's great to have a sofa in the kitchen. And sometimes it is like a cooking show, because you are talking to people and you're making stuff. And this cake has been in the house, on this thing, for 16 years. I don't know why. But we spend most of our time on the side of the house. The back of the house isn't as easy to get to, and also it's not as close to the kitchen. So I had the opportunity to have a shop, so I thought, well, you know, maybe I'll have a shop here. It's behind the house, so it's not that intrusive. A lot of people sometimes don't know that the shop and the house are connected. Even shoppers will be like, oh, where do you live? I'm like, that's my house. But then I was really pleasantly surprised at the amount of people that found it and shop here. It's definitely not on the main road. It's off a side street. And it was just sort of a way to continue to share all the things that I love and my world. So this wallpaper was like this when I came and we just sort of left it. But you can also see somehow the shadows of the little bridges get repeated. It still shows up on the walls. This may all fall off someday. I had this idea to do it like a skeleton. See, it does it until you need it. My friend Paul Lee made this. He's British. A very talented person. When guests come, there's always little things left because everyone likes to collect shells and things, but then they leave them. My friend Jeanette Farrier, she makes bed covers out of antique or vintage cantha throws. It's kind of amazing. And then they're all hand-stitched together. Selling her things for many years, we decided to create a collection together. And this is one of them. Yeah, this bathroom was a kind of weird, horrible 70s thing that was leaking and I just felt bad for the house. The door was here and we moved it here and made this a little bit brighter. Sort of then accidentally created a nook. And this was an 18th century sofa that I got at auction that became part of the collection too. This is an instructive wall chart. Probably had a rod and it was for this classroom. Maybe it's an amoeba or something. It looks almost like an octopus. I found it at a flea market. It's funny, people do gravitate here and hang out, so it's nice. Steven and I took the back bedroom just because it was quiet and it was kind of like we're in the maids' quarters basically. We have a little world back there than the rest of the houses out front that we just sort of have for friends when they come. Even though I'm not supposed to be working when I'm here because it's my holiday, I do have a studio. I make decoupage. Sometimes it's like one image is one tray, but when I do 3D things, it's multiple pieces. If we have it in the collection for a year or so, we may have overcut. So a lot of this is leftover stuff. So I'm just basically kind of recycling. These masks came from this German dealer. We've done many photo shoots with all these guys. The other thing about the house is that it has a lot of sun on this side, so the geraniums are very happy here. And people think I have a green thumb and a geranium expert, and I'm not. What's cool about the house is that it's kind of the real deal. I feel like I do talk to it. When I leave, I say thank you. Just because I feel like we're meant to be together, because it definitely is my world.