When Alyse Archer-Coité moved into the Noxon House in 2020, she expected to hit a few bumps in the road. After all, she was a single woman moving from California to New York, so there were bound to be some pain points during the cross-country transition. Of course, that was only half the battle for the design researcher as she began renovating her rural retreat, a Dutch colonial located in Poughquag, amid a global pandemic.
Despite a number of limitations (and a looming recession), Archer-Coité wasn’t deterred from curating her dream home and approached every diversion as a fun challenge. Given the 250-year-old history of the property, she had no desire to repeat the past in terms of decorating with a more traditional theme. “The people who had owned the house had very much loved the period the house was from and put in furniture and iconography and things that spoke to that time period, which I did not want to do,” she explains. “I didn’t want to have a bunch of Americana, heavy wood references to 19th-century English furniture; all that kind of stuff was just out for me.”
Jonathan Hokklo
Instead of restricting herself, Archer-Coité’s thoughtful curation consisted of different periods, genres, and materials. “I wanted a mix of things that were contemporary and craft, industrial, also delicate and feminine; all the things that I like,” she adds. “I wanted everything to be in conversation.” Her strategy for furnishing the space has been based on necessity, so there was flexibility with the timeline, but she was locked into a modest budget that couldn’t budge.
“Maybe this is more typical of my personality, but it was more like [knowing] what I didn’t want and having that helped me to define what I did want in the moments that I was purchasing things. I didn’t want to have a ton of constraints,” she says. “I wanted the freedom to make decisions as I went, not trying to back into a style.”
This past April, the designer researcher decided to drench the walls of her bedroom in Sardine from the Carte Blanche collection by Farrow & Ball and Christopher John Rogers. “I am so terrified of color,” she admits. “I would always go white because I don’t want to regret something and have to do it over once I tire of it.” But there was something attractive about bringing blue into the boudoir. Although a blue bedroom wasn’t initially on her moodboard for the house, Archer-Coité stopped resisting and submitted to the idea. Now that she’s lived with it long enough, she now describes the space as “very moody,” but “not too sexy.” It might be a bedchamber, but nothing deviant is happening in here—“I don’t want to make it a dungeon,” she adds.
“The house is very much in its own unique period, the architecture style is very specific and it has its own personality that really can’t be ignored so I wanted to play with that as much as possible, but not to stay in that period,” Archer-Coité concludes. “Looking back at it, I love how unexpected it is, that when you walk in you don’t know exactly what you’re going to find in each room.” Below, the designer researcher discloses all the details that went into the metamorphosis of her moody blue bedroom.
