The house itself is deceivingly large, with five bedrooms and a guest annexe. Originally built in 1868, its highly decorative exterior is typical of the hundreds of wooden-framed houses that form the historic core of this Victorian seaside resort, designated an architectural heritage site in 1976. Built at a time when the wealthy merchants of New Jersey were keen to show off their new fortunes, its exterior is a masterclass in one-upmanship. Here, its intricately carved gable edges and lacey cornice brackets, made by skilled carpenters and their newly steam-powered scroll-saws, shouted to the neighbours that business was indeed booming.
Twenty-first-century renovations were well underway when Tara and Percy got involved, and the double-height kitchen and guest loft had already been built, replacing a 1920s lean-to extension. ‘I never saw the house in its original state, but the moment we got involved we asked the contractors to keep everything – doors, door frames, panels – as we didn’t want to lose the connection to the house’s past,’ says Tara.
French doors lead from the sun porch to the informal sitting room, where a hotchpotch of vintage finds and folk art, mostly shipped from Sweden, meld in with the design duo’s signature coloured plaster walls. The striped sofa, one of the only pieces of furniture bought new, is from XXXXXX.
Kate S Jordan
Ruminating on how to achieve a coastal informality without totally detaching from the rigours of Victorian design, Tara hit upon Swedish design, where clean lines are balanced with cosy warmth, as the perfect meeting point between the two styles. ‘I realised that there were many elements that were very similar – the woodwork, the shapes of furniture, the folk art that I kept finding in Swedish online auctions, somehow spoke to the feeling I was working towards in Cape May,’ she explains. She set about filling crates, remotely, with furniture and artworks that she had bought, unseen and often without a specific placement plan for them, and yet confident that everything would eventually find its own place in the house. And if a piece needed a slight adjustment, Percy was on hand with his toolbox to make good.
‘The house needed to feel cosy, and we put a lot of energy into that,’ Tara continues, describing the months Percy spent hand-carving additional detailing into new woodwork to tie it back to its Victorian roots. ‘It was an insane amount of work,’ she adds. She talks of the months that Percy spent balanced on scaffolding, of how they layered the walls with tinted plaster, then hand-polished and stamped or stencilled them with pattern. There were no shortcuts here, no limits to the degree of attention put into every step of the design and decoration. When Tara undertook the decoration of the attic bedroom with a single hand stamp, she had to line the pattern up with over 1,000 carefully calculated pencil dots. She admits to be verging on obsessive, but the overall result is an interior that glows with the love that has been lavished on it.
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