Interior Designer Noelani Zervas at Home

Interior designer Noelani Zervas outside her Tudor-style home in Milton, Massachusetts.

Zervas gave a late-1800s painting that portrays a fortune teller pride of place in her family’s TV hangout.

Located at the back of the TV room, this dining nook is the family’s informal gathering space. The custom curved banquette was a happy accident: it was originally intended for the foyer, but its radius coincidentally wound up being the same as the table.

Upper cabinets were eschewed entirely in the kitchen, thanks to the stealth storage just beyond in the butler’s pantry.

The pantry hides the hardworking heart of the kitchen—appliances, storage, and all—behind a sliding door. Like many decisions in the home, this space is a confident blend of style and subversion: darker and funkier than the adjacent kitchen yet essential to that room’s uncluttered appeal.

The dining room’s antique side chair—rescued from an auction, where it was upholstered in a tattered tapestry—now has a fresh look in Schumacher’s Annika Floral Tapestry.

A zodiac-print panel by Schumacher transforms the room’s ceiling into a starry sky. The designer considered wrapping the entire foyer in it, but the dining room ceiling “just felt right.”

Layered with twin pendants and personal symbolism in the form of ocular wallpaper, this powder room proves small spaces can hold big stories.

A zodiac-print panel by Schumacher transforms the room’s ceiling into a starry sky. The designer considered wrapping the entire foyer in it, but the dining room ceiling “just felt right.”

Octopus-patterned wallpaper from cult brand Grow House Grow anchors the primary suite with unexpected surrealism.

Restoring and Reinventing a 1928 Tudor

When designer Noelani Zervas first toured this 1928 Tudor in Milton, Massachusetts, it had already scared off another buyer, who backed out of the deal post-inspection. “It was a total fixer-upper money pit,” Zervas explains. “It needed everything.”

While a lot of the issues were cosmetic, some were truly necessary. All of the brick, for instance, needed to be repointed, and the systems updated. But what the house lacked in polish, it made up for in potential. So once the vital issues were fixed, Zervas turned to aesthetics, repointing (ahem) the home’s style, too. That included everything from paint and wallcoverings to adding an open-plan kitchen/great room, a feat in its own right. “There was quite a bit of structural work needed to accommodate the open concept,” says Eric Johnson, owner of Scorpion Construction Group. “We wound up adding a forty-two-foot ClearSpan steel beam that takes a load off the exterior wall.”

Bold Interior Design Decisions and Personal Touches

While Zervas and her husband had played it safe with small-scale revamps for the first eleven years they lived in the home, “This time around, he took the shackles off,” Zervas recalls. “He said, ‘You’ve got a vision, run with it.’ ”

And run she did. Now, their family’s home exudes a fearlessness that would shock the actual Tudors to the core. Case in point: the new wall color in the great room, Farrow & Ball’s Dead Salmon. “Everybody flipped a biscuit over that,” says Zervas, “but it’s just so much better than a neutral.”
Zervas contrasted the deliciously dirty pink with the trim’s warm green: Sherwin-Williams Retreat. “Noelani’s naturally inclined for design,” says
Johnson. “Sometimes we are looking at it like, ‘Wow, that’s interesting that you thought of that.’ And then when it comes together it’s like, ‘That’s
absolutely amazing.’ ”

In the dining room, Zervas applied a celestial wallpaper within the coffered ceiling. “It’s a zodiac panel from Schumacher,” she says. “When you’re looking up, it’s kind of like seeing the constellations in the sky.”

Even the powder room channels symbolism, with a wallpaper that is quite literally eye-popping. “I married into an awesome, huge Greek family, so it’s kind of an homage to the evil eye and warding off bad luck,” says Zervas. Or maybe it’s a nod to a designer who doesn’t need luck—not when she trusts her instincts.

Project Team
Architectural design: Rockwood Design
Interior design: Noelani Zervas Interiors
Builder: Scorpion Construction Group
Landscape design: J. McKinnon Inc.