Cutting Class
John Peixinho knows a thing or two about serendipity. Two decades ago, while he
was working in his father’s dry-cleaning shop, a client and friend told him: “You
are wasting your life doing what you’re doing. Why don’t you become an interior
decorator and you can start with me?”
Peixinho didn’t have any formal design experience, but no matter: The client —
the late Oatsie Charles, one of Newport’s eminent grande dames — was not the type
to take no for an answer.
Charles asked Peixinho to redecorate a study in her home, then she passed his
name around her network of lunching ladies. Peixinho helped usher their estates
into the twenty-first century, albeit subtly; Newport’s Gilded Age mansions — and
their occupants — can be resistant to change.
While his reputation grew, Peixinho admired a little red schoolhouse on an
opposite peninsula on Aquidneck Island, a Gatsby-esque contrast to the “summer
cottages” he redecorated on Bellevue Avenue.
“I’d always thought it was this wonderful, magical place on Third Beach Road,”
recalls the designer. “Fourteen years ago, I had the opportunity to rent it from a
friend and, after about two or three years, I was able to buy it from her. I just sort
of grew into it.”
Peixinho deployed a burlap wall treatment in the living room,
which reminded him of school bulletin boards. The window seat,
once the site of the teacher’s desk, boasts nineteenth-century
paintings of the Old Stone Mill and Second and Third beaches.
A backgammon table doubles as a coffee table.
84 RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l OCTOBER 2020