My Design Studio is located in a cheerful yellow house on Route 30 with the new beginnings of a freshly planted English Cottage garden: tended, coddled and fretted over everyday. It is cheerful inside too, every inch freshly painted. There are fabric and decorating books stacked high on shelves and a designer-decorated apartment in the back for weekend rentals.
I have decided that a house is what you make it. Plain and simple. If you are willing to put in the effort and a little imagination you can turn any house into a welcoming retreat. When we bought this house it was run down and sadly neglected. At that time it was a three-apartment rental with lots of people coming and going, no one every staying very long, and some even leaving in a cloud of drama. Tired of being landlords and needing a space for my growing business, my husband and I decided the best course was for me to move my interior design business into the building. During the year-long renovation lots of subcontractors came through the door – plumbers, electricians, painters. One common theme emerged. Almost all of them to a man would look around and tell me how they spent many evenings in their youth in this house partying and raising the roof. The details were never forthcoming but there was always a bit of wistfulness in their eyes as the memories flashed back to their rowdier days. Apparently, this was the party house of the neighborhood. I felt a bit like a reform school director straightening out a wayward child and taking all the fun out of it to boot. They would tell me it looked very pretty, and shaking their heads walk away at the end of their workday.
Now the house is its own world created from imagination and inspired by scenes out of Rosamunde Pilcher’s novels set in the West Country of England. On our family trip to Cornwall when our girls were 5 and 7, we stayed in a classic version of a Bed and Breakfast as only the English can present. We were lucky enough to stay in beds with canopies above our heads, Laura Ashley floral bathrooms, and thatch roofed chicken houses nestled in gardens filled with color. My oldest daughter remembers feeling like a princess in those rooms. I would say decorating has done its job if you can make a little girl, and maybe even some adults, feel like a princess. The details of that trip have stayed with me through the years and finally had an outlet in this particular house with its classic Vermont farmhouse bones.
Quiet and peaceful, the house sits proudly on Route 30 across from a marble quarry. I don’t think people who stay in the little rental out back have any idea of its past and perhaps that’s okay. Even a house can change its ways.
For more details about the vacation rental and to view photos, visit dorsetnest.blogspot.com
