Ayear after John Derian moved into his Greek Revival home in New England, one of his brothers came to stay. He told Derian to take his time with the project. “I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I’d already renovated,” says Derian. “I just wanted it to be as it was.”
Derian is a découpage artist and the founder of John Derian Company Inc, a homeware store that opened in New York’s East Village in 1989. There are now four John Derian stores in New York and one in Provincetown. His products – from handmade plates to ceramics, fabrics and furniture – are stocked in more than 600 shops worldwide. In the UK, you’ll find them in the Conran Shop and Liberty.
The images Derian sets behind glass are from a collection of antique prints he has amassed over three decades. They come largely from 18th and 19th-century educational resources and depict everything from impossibly vibrant fruit and vegetables and flowers to a scene from a seance or a hyper-real blowfish. Two years ago Derian published the John Derian Picture Bookshowcasing around 300 images from his collection. “I always tell people to buy a couple of copies,” he says. “One to keep, and one to tear apart and put up on their walls!”
I ask him what filters he applies to his search for imagery: “I don’t specifically look for anything,” he explains. “I find things. I let things happen.” It’s an approach that appears to work for property, as well as pictures.
As a child, Derian spent his holidays on Cape Cod. In 2006, he returned to Provincetown with a friend. “I wasn’t even looking to buy a house, but it was love at first sight,” he recalls. “There was something about this house just sitting here, a little bit abandoned-looking. Plus, I’m a sucker for a column…”
The house he fell in love with was built for a sea captain in 1789. When Derian first saw the property, he took a video of the exterior and called the estate agent, only to be told it was under offer. Back in New York, a technical glitch on his phone meant the video kept replaying. A few months later, he was idly searching online for properties in Provincetown and the sea captain’s house resurfaced. The original offer had fallen through: Derian could go ahead with the purchase.
“When I first went inside, it felt untouched. It was like a museum – almost frozen in time,” he says. He soon realised that this was precisely how the house should remain. Some invisible repairs took place – new plumbing and electrics were installed and some of the walls reinsulated (the original insulation was two sheets of brown paper, stuffed with seaweed and hand-stitched together) – but everything else was left exactly as he found it.
In the stairway, for example, scraps of wallpaper from the 1930s are left hanging off the wall. Where the paper has peeled away, outlines of the design are visible – “You can still see the ghost of a bridge imprinted on the seashell and horsehair plaster.” In some of the rooms, the painted floorboards retain a “splatter pattern” – a decorating trend from the 1930s. (Derian owns a book first published in 1932 called Colonial Architecture of Cape Cod, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. In it is a page showing “typical floor patterns and splatters” of the period, including the “violet background with white splatters” found in Derian’s front room.)
Derian describes the house as a “clown car”: it has eight bedrooms and can pack in a lot of visitors. Which is just as well, as this is a place for friends to congregate, a sanctuary from his studios in New York, which release over 700 new designs each year. In the front room two sofas (Derian’s own design) face one another allowing six people to gather comfortably round for a game of canasta or charades. In the kitchen, guests can busy themselves around an antique, circular butcher’s block. “It’s proven to be the most perfect thing here,” says Derian. “We all move around it, cooking, chopping, cleaning. It creates a flow.”
Throughout the rooms, dramatic boughs of foliage tickle the low ceiling, or droop from mantelpieces towards the floor. The patinated walls are hung with oil paintings of ships, framed paper ephemera and prints (“I can sometimes live with something for 10 years before I think to make it into a tray,” he says.) On every surface are clusters of found objects, including shells, bones, stones and seed pods. “I’ve been fascinated by nature since I was a child,” explains Derian. “Collecting and displaying objects, rearranging furniture, drawing, play acting – I’ve basically been doing the same exact things my whole life.”
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