Five years ago, Nicole Tirapelli moved to Nantucket with her two young children. She had visited the Massachusetts island, with its quaint, maritime vibe, several times as a tourist and fantasized about living there though she was not particularly nautical. Trained as a chef and the onetime owner of a wedding cake bakery, she spent much of her professional life helping her father run a Ford dealership near Chicago.
“She was the cutest person ever working in a car sales job,” said her friend Meg Piercy, 41, a Chicago designer who owns the company MP Interiors and bonded with Ms. Tirapelli over a shared love of vintage artifacts.
After schools closed during the pandemic, Ms. Tirapelli, who is now 48, relocated to the island community of Siasconset (commonly known as “Sconset”). She bought a two-bedroom cottage a few blocks from the ocean and fixed it up with Ms. Piercy’s help. She helped manage local estate sales filled with captivating secondhand objects and became known on the Nantucket Consignments Facebook group as “the furniture lady.” Upon obtaining a real estate license, she applied what she knew about automobile sales to her new life selling houses.
As her son, Jack, now 14, and her daughter, Lily, now 16, matured, she looked for a house in Sconset with separate bedrooms for the children and found one that had been on and off the market for several years because of its poor condition.
Named Ivy Lodge, the 1,978-square-foot property on 0.06 acres rambled horizontally but was stunted vertically. Its low ceilings were a legacy of its early-19th-century origins, when the heights of Americans averaged 5 feet 7 inches for men and 5 feet 2 inches for women. A pair of short, steep staircases at either end of the house led to a second floor that was basically an attic.
Ms. Tirapelli was not put off. In late 2021, she paid $1.3 million for the house and with the help of Ms. Piercy transformed it into a showplace infused with Yankee ingenuity and thrift. Though the women acknowledged that Ms. Piercy’s basketball-playing nephew Jeremiah Robinson-Earl, who was recently drafted by the New Orleans Pelicans, would not fit there (he’s 6 foot 8), they enhanced the home’s comfort for almost anyone else without compromising its historical integrity.
According to a report prepared three years ago by Marsha L. Fader, an architect, and Betsy Tyler, a historian, for the preservation nonprofit the ’Sconset Trust, Ivy Lodge was built sometime between 1797 and 1814 and its first known owner was a merchant named Matthew Barney. In 1827, it was acquired by Benjamin Worth, a whaling captain, who sold it to a fellow mariner, George Alley, in 1848. Asa P. Jones, a carpenter, purchased it in 1850.
At some point along the way, the property was expanded and named for the vine that flourished around it. Louise Streeter Warren, the owner of multiple homes in Nantucket, bought the house from the Jones family in 1905 and described it as Ivy Lodge when she advertised it as a summer rental.
“She was involved in several lawsuits brought by creditors, and her brother attempted unsuccessfully to have her declared insane,” the ’Sconset Trust report stated.
After Ms. Warren went bankrupt, Ivy Lodge was acquired and flipped, winding up, in 1943, with Marjorie Diven, Frank Sinatra’s secretary and fan club coordinator. Ms. Diven rented a portion of the building to New England Telephone and Telegraph, which used it as an office where villagers could stop by to pay their phone bills.
After Ms. Diven’s departure in 1951, a family named Lindstrom, followed by a family named Woodhead, assumed ownership for the next 70 years. Which brings us to the day in 2021 when an enchanted Ms. Tirapelli arrived to set the then-ramshackle house back on its feet.
More accurately, she left it on its base. Her contractor advised her to hoist the building, which sits on a bluff, to make it easier to upgrade the mechanicals and insulate it for comfortable year-round use, but that would have meant destroying the rubble foundation, a thing of scrappy, vernacular beauty. She found other ways to winterize.
When she acquired it, Ivy Lodge was a duplex with a pair of ground-level kitchens. Ms. Tirapelli and Ms. Piercy turned the larger of the two, which had the higher ceiling and an attached bathroom, into the primary bedroom. The surviving kitchen was opened to the adjacent room, creating a more spacious area for cooking and eating. Between these two poles are now a living room with harpoons hanging from the ceiling and a dining room with a chandelier formed from giant crystal feathers. A wall was moved to create a larger laundry room, and a half bathroom between the current kitchen and dining room gave way to the “Sinatra bar,” a niche named in honor of the crooner.
Operating at full vintage throttle, the women restored or recreated original wood paneling, laid down hexagonal terra cotta floor tiles, hung nautical-themed oil paintings and scoured estate sales and consignment shops for furniture that was tidied up in Ms. Piercy’s Chicago workshop.
A rustic rattan/sisal/lattice theme emerged as Ms. Tirapelli picked up a set of vintage Palecek dining chairs with cane backrests that had been left outdoors to molder, paying $25 a chair; Ms. Piercy brought them back to gleaming life. Christina Rose Manca, a Nantucket artist, wove rectangular wicker baskets to fit the cubby holes in the kitchen storage unit. (“I don’t like cabinets,” Ms. Tirapelli noted, drawing attention to plates lined up vertically in open racks and curtain fabric draped where cabinet doors normally go.) Ms. Manca also wove a pendant lamp for the entrance and a coffee table that sits in the living room, flanked by a pair of overstuffed paisley-patterned armchairs.
The lower floor’s blue-and-white color scheme was juiced by Ms. Tirapelli’s love of Delft ceramics. Hand-painted tiles exported from the Netherlands make up the floral mural behind the navy Aga range and the Nantucket Harbor scene in the primary shower. Richard Ginori dinner plates, Schumacher wallcoverings, striped Casa Branca upholstery fabric, a checked floor mat, bed pillows printed with schooners — all are in shades of sapphire and snow.
As Ms. Tirapelli and Ms. Piercy worked their way up to the rooms tucked under the eaves, the color palette grew more complex.
The blue-and-white “became an argument between us because I cannot do a dual-color home,” Ms. Piercy said. She summoned green. The Morris & Company wallpaper in Lily’s bedroom has a concentration of the home’s mascot plant, ivy. And the ceiling of the bunk room between Lily’s and Jack’s bedrooms is sheathed in a white painted lattice on green walls, inspired by the interiors of a nearby tennis club. The bunk room sleeps up to six and has become a hangout for the children and their friends.
Ms. Piercy’s choice of an ivy pattern for Lily’s room was compensatory in a way. The real ivy had developed a codependent relationship with roses that threaded through the leaves and burst into bloom in summer.
Lovely, right?
Not really, said the neighbors who were stabbed by thorns poking out of the chaotic growth that invaded the sidewalk. Martin McGowan, a landscape designer in Sconset, who created the garden, suggested cutting down the tangle and replacing it with neat ivy panels mounted on the surrounding fence.
“The neighbors were so happy to see the ivy back, but tamed,” Ms. Tirapelli said. Better-behaved roses are to come.
She also ingratiated herself with her adopted community by taking over the lease of the soda fountain at the Nantucket Pharmacy, which was founded in 1937 and threatened with extinction when the pharmacy’s current owner, Allan Bell, announced his plan to retire two years ago.
“We want to bring back the best of the best recipes over the years,” she said shortly before the fountain was reopened last week. “Pete’s Dirty Water Dogs, Jean’s Chopped Ham & Pickle.”
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