Bringing Gilded Age Elegance to a Newport Home

To complement the Gracie wallpaper, designer Melissa Lindsay painted the trim Benjamin Moore Caldwell Green, which, she says, “struck the right balance of being historic in nature, feminine but still Old World, and paired really nicely with the wood tones, brass, and mauve that we brought in.”

Shapely chairbacks around the dining table add some eye candy to the foyer.

Shapely chairbacks around the dining table add some eye candy to the foyer.

A convex mirror supplies a crisp modernist touch in the reading room that prevents it from crossing over into stuffy or stuck in time.

In the family room adjacent to the open kitchen, Lindsay brought in an antique wood console accented with a plaster table lamp. Above the kitchen island, antique Italian garden lanterns from L’Antiquaire nod to yesteryear.

Above the kitchen island, antique Italian garden lanterns from L’Antiquaire bring a timeless charm, seamlessly blending vintage elegance with modern function in this inviting space.

The study is dressed in Zak+Fox wallpaper: “Opposite the reading room, we went really moody and dark,” the designer says, which is fitting for a space where the family occasionally piles in to watch TV together.

The design team renovated the third floor to add additional bedrooms, like this guest room swathed in a Sanderson wallcovering, one of Lindsay’s favorites, that has a bit of a retro vibe.

The primary bath’s new flooring, comprised of tumbled Bardiglio and Carrara marbles, has a timeworn look.

Newport, Rhode Island, has been a dreamy maximalist family getaway since even before 1893, when the Vanderbilts broke ground on The Breakers at the height of the Gilded Age. And for Westport, Connecticut, designer Melissa Lindsay’s longtime clients, a bit of that sumptuous, saturated aura was exactly what they were after in their Newport vacation home. “She didn’t want your typical ‘house on the water’ feeling,” says Lindsay, founder of Pimlico Interiors. “She was not liking a lot of the things that she saw.”

In short: coastal blues and Life’s a Beach signs weren’t going to cut it. So the designer leaned into the rich hues and finishes that summon Newport’s decadent heyday. “The house is nestled in with all of the historic homes,” she says. “Even though it’s new, it feels like it’s old by the way it was designed. You very much have that sense of history when you’re walking down the street, and the feeling was to create something that had a historic timelessness to it.”

That all started with good bones, courtesy of Hull Cove Design and Kirby Perkins Construction. “My company built the house about three years before this family bought it,” says builder Tom Perkins, who also oversaw the recent revamp, which included a reconfigured third floor, a new primary bath, and finishing the unfinished basement.

Then there was the matter of aesthetic improvements. “She showed me one inspiration image and said, ‘this is the vibe,’ ” recalls Lindsay. The muse was a vignette from a boutique hotel on Nantucket with hand-painted Gracie wallpaper depicting a landscape in sepia. “It ended up being the paper that we used in what we call the reading room.” To complement it, Lindsay painted the trim Benjamin Moore Caldwell Green. When it came to furniture, she introduced shades of mauve, teal, and sepia along with wood and brass tones. “We just went off of that palette throughout the rest of the home, too,” she says.

Now that the project is finished, those crossing the threshold know at a glance that they’re not in a typical beach house. “There’s always a big surprise when you walk in the front entrance, and you have this sort of old-world room on your left and what looks like a bar room on your right,” says Lindsay. “Very dramatic.” The Vanderbilts would have loved it.

Project Team 
Architecture: Hull Cove Design
Interior design: Pimlico Interiors by Melissa Lindsay
Builder: Kirby Perkins Construction