How a Design Researcher Curated Her Moody Blue Bedroom For $5,456

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Photo: Jonathan Hokklo

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.”

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.

What was your approach to furnishing your house?

I was limited by the fact that we were in the middle of a global pandemic and lockdown. If any of us even are willing to remember that time, there were things that would’ve been normal to get overnight or within the week delivered to you were no longer available. So a lot of my Hail Mary furnishing choices are like, “What does Amazon have in the way of single beds for kids that I can reinforce and make look like they’re for adults?” Things like that were decisions I had to make. My strategy was to get individual pieces that I loved regardless of the cost, if I could afford it, but regardless of the cost get pieces that I loved and build out from there. So I went with a lot of big pieces initially because the house is big and anything smaller was starting to look very dwarfed in the house.

I didn’t bring much furniture with me, I was coming from California, and relocating back to the East Coast. I had some furniture pieces, but they were on a truck that was coming months later. When I saw something I liked, like a bed or a sofa, I would buy it and then wait for it to arrive and go from there. Getting the scale of a room in mind is really hard to do without putting furniture in it, even if you know the dimensions. Until you start to fill it, you don’t really know how big it is. That’s my experience. Everything I thought would be right in a room I would put in and be like, “Wow, this looks like children’s furniture once it’s in the room.” Getting big things was part of the strategy for understanding the size of the room and how much a room could really handle.

Did you have a budget?

I mean, if I’m being totally honest, I was really moving check to check at that point. I had just purchased the house. Before I bought this house, the most expensive thing I had owned was a Peloton bike. I had very little understanding of the cost of being in real estate, of owning real estate. So for me, when I bought the house, I had an estimated monthly output in mind that was a mix of what my bank had shown me and also what I understood would be the cost of heating and cooling and basic appliances and things like that running in the house.

For example, the cost of gas went way up during COVID for various reasons. My house was running on propane, so the cost of heating my house went through the roof. I ended up having to pay over $1,000 a month to heat my house in the winter. I moved in mid-December. My first week there we had a massive storm that took out the power, etc., so I had not anticipated those costs. Any budget I had toward furnishing ended up being my budget for living comfortably and not surviving in the house, so it really was like, after I paid all my bills, what did I have left? Could I really justify spending all that money on furniture?

The answer is yes. I didn’t shop anymore for clothing, I spent all my money on furniture items so if I had a check that didn’t go toward paying for utilities and my mortgage, I would use that for furniture. I didn’t really have a budget so much as I was very, very clear that any overage I had at the end of the month was spoken for in terms of furnishing.

The way the house was set up matched with my budget and with what was going on in the world at the time. My experience led me to really have to learn to be comfortable in an empty room to say, “This room is not done. This room will not be done until the right pieces show up, so if it’s just this chair that I love for the next six months, that’s okay because you have to settle in a room that is not done and be okay with it.” I think the anxiety around finishing, making the room comfortable, or being able to use the room can really force you to make decisions that you’re going to regret later. So that was what I was fighting most, it was like, “Choose a piece and go with it slowly.”

What was your inspiration for this room?

I had never, in my adult life, had a king size bed. I had never had a room in New York where I could even imagine a bed bigger than a queen and this room really just begged for big bed, big luxury, just a place to really luxuriate. The room, in the way that a lot of rooms are in this house, every wall has a different use. There’s windows on one wall and closets on another, there’s the entrance door and on the last wall is the door to the bathroom, so you’re really limited where you can put your bed. Basically, the center of the room had to be the bed, so those parameters were actually really useful for me because there were only so many ways I could appoint the room. I knew that I wanted it to feel really cozy, but not in the “everything is plush” way. I wanted it to feel cozy and minimal, really stripped back. The best way to do that was with fabric and then also with color.

The room was painted green when I bought the house, like a Farrow & Ball “Card Room Green.” I tried to match it for years, I even called the past owners to ask and they were like, “We also inherited that green, we have no idea what it is.” When I moved in, I thought, “I’m definitely going to paint this white, I want to start with a clean white space.” But after living in it for a couple of months and not really wanting to spend the money to have it painted, I grew to love the color and realized that waking up in a room that was drenched in a joyful color like a green was really good for me. So I knew I wanted color, but I wanted something that felt historical, that didn’t feel too poppy or contemporary.

As much as I wanted to push against the boundaries or lines of the house, I didn’t want to take it to the point of being too whimsical. The inspiration was luxury, but also a little bit of whimsy, a little bit of playfulness. I am definitely a straight lines, clean space girly and that bed was so wild, but it really, really spoke to me and I thought, “This could be it. This could be the thing that makes the room and I can work backwards from here.” The bed was one of my earliest purchases. It came from Montreal and got broken in shipping, and I had to have an iron worker come out and put it back together on site.

The bed has almost like a Cy Twombly drawing feeling. I found lamps that also look very curlicued, those were the first lamps I ever put next to the bed that I thought, “These don’t take away from the bed or push the bed or feel awkward with the bed. They feel like they were made to be next to it.” I had to have those shipped from London. There were three at the time and I couldn’t imagine paying for all three, so I only bought two. I now have a lot of regret and should have bought all three, but it took almost three years for those lamps to find me. I didn’t know that I needed them.

What was your biggest splurge?

The most expensive thing actually were those lamps and they were the thing I couldn’t deny. I was like, “I finally found lamps that can work in this cursed room.” My very first week in the house I lost power and I had to read by candle light, I thought ghosts were coming to kill me. The lamps were a big splurge, especially given how much am I using them? The bed I’m using all the time, but the lamps…. It’s the most I’ve ever paid for lighting.

What was your best deal?

There are these little chairs from Tubbs of Vermont. I had never heard of them before in my life, but I went to Horseman Antiques in Brooklyn Heights probably six or seven years ago and found these chairs up in the upper levels of that place. The chairs didn’t have any price tag on them. The guy at the front was looking and looking, but couldn’t find it so he was like, “Let’s just say they’re $200 for both.” I said, “Are you sure?” And he said, “Yeah, whatever.” So we took them and I remember posting about them, and a friend of mine who’s from Vermont said, “Oh my God.”

I have had so many inquiries about those chairs, people trying to buy them, people trying to find out who made them. I’ve seen chairs that are reminiscent, but I’ve never seen the exact chairs anywhere else. I know that they were not supposed to be $200 for the pair, maybe they should have been $500, but what they have brought me in terms of satisfaction and as much interest as they garner, I think they were probably the best deal.

Even if it wasn’t the best monetary deal, what are some things that, to you, were well worth the price?

Paint is actually the best investment you can make in a space, and it’s one of the hardest things to do. I think a lot of people say they want color, but when they’re working with the designers, they get nervous about doing the wrong things and they tend to want to go white. If you can find the bravery to do it, it really has elevated the space so tremendously for me. I knew I liked the green color, that was pretty cool after a while. But choosing this color and having it be on the ceiling and on the outlets and covering the vents…. It has made me feel like a grown up, that was a very grown up move. If I took everything else out of the room except for the bed and the paint, I could probably still love that room.

Is there anything that wasn’t worth the money? Do you regret making any purchases?

The tapestry in that room that I bought at this former antiques mall a couple of miles away from my house. You walked in and it was like a junk sale, but there were gems. I went there and found it in a corner and it was priced as is, no negotiations, for $250. I wanted a tapestry, but I didn’t want it to have people in it because all the tapestries have these 19th-century French style of white people sitting in the park eating or hunting or whatever. I was like, “I don’t want to have that visual in my bedroom.” I wanted something exclusively with an animal on it. So I thought, “This is it. This is such a great deal, I’m not even going to ask for a discount.”

Fast-forward to not even three months ago, a friend of mine was at some sort of big open-air antique fair and posted a tapestry she got on Instagram and I said, “That’s exactly the tapestry I have.” Not reminiscent of, not referencing. My tapestry is a confirmed replica. I sent her a photo and she said, “Oh no! How much did you pay for yours?” And I said, “Well, I spent $250.” She said, “Oh, okay…. Mine was $40.” I said, “Damn, that really stung!” I think in every collector-obsessed person’s life there has to be one where you really get robbed, that’s how you know you really have skin in the game.

Do you have a favorite piece in the room?

Yes. It seems so boring to say, but I think it has to be the bed. It’s the most fun and funny and enormous kind of bed. It really defines the room. I think it’s the only piece in the room that if I took out and swapped for something else, the entire room would change and never look the same. Everything else is really special, but I’ve played around with getting rid of or bringing back or whatever many times; the bed is the mainstay.

How would you describe the vibe of the room?

I think it’s surprisingly joyful. I would say that it’s mutable. There’s a vibe in the morning, in the afternoon, and in the evening. The light changes so much in the house throughout the day, and the bedroom is a place where you really see that play out throughout the day. It has an en suite bathroom, so if you’re upstairs in that room, that’s probably the room where you have most of what you need to spend the day. It’s self-sufficient. The vibe is elegant and comfortable.

At this point, is the room complete or do you still have things left on your shopping list?

There are definitely things I would still like to do. The bedside table situation is not ideal because both lamps are different heights. I would have loved to have had a bedside table that was a little more lean. The space between the bed and the closet doors is very narrow on the left and right side, so whatever bedside table I have has to be narrow like a plank and I have yet to find a matching set that works. Right now I have a single bedside table and then I have one of the shorter lamps on it to raise the height and make it equal to the floor lamp. So there’s really nowhere to put your drink. It’s just not super useful, you end up putting a lot of stuff on the floor. It looks good in photos, but it’s not great in practice. So I would love to find a bedside table solution for one or both sides.

I am not totally satisfied with the bedding. This bedroom is wonderful and presents challenges every day. It’s very hard to do something graphic. It’s tricky to do anything dark because the bed is wrought iron so it has almost this inherent gothic feeling. You can see through it obviously, but having white bedding on it breaks in a weird way, the shapes are almost too prominent. So I haven’t found a bedding color, design, or texture that feels exactly right.

Bedding is so expensive and it’s annoying to get wrong. It’s like a rug; once you unfurl that thing, it belongs to you. You don’t want to deal with returning it or folding it back up. I feel the same way with bedding. I’ve bought so much for that bedroom and either given it away or folded it up as backup in case the cleaning lady needs another set. I’m just not happy with the bedding I have on it. Bedside tables and bedding. It’s been four years and I still haven’t found them, it’s the most trivial thing seemingly, but the hardest to nail.

Shop looks inspired by Alyse Archer-Coite’s Bedroom

Art Deco Revival Black Gold Flattened Metal Tube Queen Bed by Michele Archiutti

$3295.00, 1st Dibs

Sardine, Dead Flat

$49.00, Farrow&Ball

Cooling Cotton Percale Core Sheet Set

$149.00, Brooklinen

Zigzag Table Lamp

$99.00, West Elm

Miniver Reclaimed Elm Wood Curved Upholstered Dining Chair

$499.00, World Market

Cinco Faces Vase by Taller Manos Que Ven

$75.00, Eterna Ven

LA FAE Verdure Tapestry III

$268.00, Etsy

European Linen Duvet Cover

$100.00, Quince

Louie Isaaman-Jones Bookstand

$325.00, APOC

Shaker-style Candle Stand

$400.00, Etsy

This story is a part of Room Receipts, a series where we get real about the costs behind one well-designed room. From big budget spenders to thrifty thinkers, we’re talking to people from different worlds about their worth-it splurges, budget hacks, and purchase regrets. We’re always on the hunt for cool homes with a unique story, so if you’re interested in being featured tell us more about your space here.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest