ARTISTIC ENDEAVOUR Designer John Derian made it his mission to restore this Cape Cod home
Preserving the authentic character of this Cape Cod house was a priority for its owner, designer John Derian
John Derian is a man driven by gut instincts. His emotive pull towards antiques, ceramics and theatrical kitsch has been the basis for his successful homewares business, beloved from New York to London. So when he felt strongly drawn towards a shingle-clad house listed for sale in Provincetown, Cape Cod, he made a quick bid for ownership. ‘I hadn’t visited Provincetown in over five years, but I used to come here most summers as a child. In 2006, I was visiting a friend and saw the house listed for sale and it really struck me,’ recalls John.
He was disappointed to learn that the house was already under offer and, in fact, off the market. Returning to regular life in New York City, John tried to put the property out of his mind but his efforts were thwarted, somewhat bizarrely, by a technical glitch on his phone. ‘I’d taken a video of the house when I viewed it and strangely, through some fault of my phone, it kept playing whenever I put the phone down. It seemed as if the house was calling me,’ he says. Phoning back his broker in the autumn, John was delighted to find the sale had fallen through and the house was back on the market. By March 2007, he was the new owner.
The property that so beguiled him was built in 1789 and had originally belonged to a Captain Small before passing on to another family in the 1930s, acting briefly as a boarding house and then finally falling into John’s hands. ‘I’m only the third owner,’ he explains. Having been so seduced by the exterior, when John viewed the interior he was equally delighted. ‘It was perfect and untouched. I hadn’t even clocked the sea views,’ he says. While the average buyer might have embarked on a vigorous modern upgrade, John chose simply to rewire and
upgrade the plumbing. ‘A year after the renovation, my brother came to visit and advised me to take my time over the restoration. I didn’t tell him I’d already done everything I wanted to,’ he says, laughing.
Examining the integrity of the chimneys offered John clues into the house’s history. ‘There was a fire in the late 1800s so many records had been lost, but the chimney specialist deduced that half the house was built in the 1700s and half in the early 1800s,’ says John. ‘It was a “half Cape” originally, with two windows on one side of the door, rather than double fronted.’ Peeling back layers of the wallpaper revealed plaster made from horsehair and crushed seashells. ‘We found insulation comprised of seaweed stitched between sheets of brown paper,’ says John. The company that produced the material is commemorated in the framed brown paper labelled ‘Quilt’ above his bed. Extraordinary original wallpapers remain clinging to the walls, where they were previously covered with 1970s updates. Elsewhere, the mottled plaster provides a backdrop to antiques reminiscent of a William Turner painterly sky. Paint curls off the woodwork, preserved in its ageing glory. Floors throughout have been left untouched, in some cases allowing guests to marvel at the splattered ‘Cape Cod floors’ that were popular in the 1930s.
John’s seasonal shop sits below the back of the house and is accessed via a secluded side street, meaning he is undisturbed by his customers.
Other successes since John took ownership are the hornbeam hedges he planted, as well as the bay laurel hedge maturing outside the front windows. ‘The town swells in population from 2,000 to around 60,000 in summer and although we’re centrally located, it still feels very private,’ he notes. A keen home-grower, John is able to potter in his small vegetable garden undisturbed, just as Captain Small probably did a few hundred years before him.