Boston Home

A Color-Drenched, Addams-Family-Inspired Dreamhouse in Rhode Island

Mattye Dewhirst's Tiverton Victorian is a spectacular fantasy decades in the making, with sun tunnels, a dumbwaiter, and an aversion to blue.

By Madeline Bilis· 3/5/2026, 11:07 a.m.

Living room with olive green walls and ceiling, featuring two arched windows. The room has a black leather curved sofa with a yellow pillow, two black chairs with white cushions, a striped round side table with flowers, and a pink double-stacked ottoman. The floor is tiled in black with scattered colored tiles. A wooden sideboard with books and decorative items is against one wall, which is adorned with various framed artworks and a large leafy plant near the windows.

“The living room is called wasabi, and I just love that color,” says homeowner Mattye Dewhirst. “I know a lot of people hate it, but I don’t care. Photo by Tom Couture

Before designer Mattye Dewhirst’s Second Empire Victorian broke ground in coastal Rhode Island, it existed for years in her head. She started sketching out her dream home in high school, but other versions materialized much earlier—back when she discovered her love of design while playing the computer game The Sims.

“It may have looked like a castle in the beginning,” Dewhirst, who shares the home with her partner, photographer Tom Couture, recalls playfully. “But over the years, it got smaller and more realistic.”

She bought a plot of land she’d been dreaming about—one with frontage along an inlet off Sakonnet Bay—and teamed up with architect and family friend Matt Brown to convert her preliminary blueprints into a wildly colorful reality. The goal was to re-create the style of antique homes she loved while making room for features they often lacked, like sizable closets and lots of natural light.

A large, dark-colored Victorian-style house with multiple windows lit from inside, featuring a wraparound porch with hanging lights and a hammock, set against a sunset sky and surrounded by green grass and trees.

The home’s black-painted exterior was partially inspired by The Addams Family. Dewhirst named her house “the Black Iris.” / Photo by Tom Couture

A hallway with peach-colored walls and tiled floor leads to a room with bright green walls. The hallway features an arched doorway, two wall sconces, a framed artwork on the left wall, and wooden stairs on the right. Inside the green room, there is a black leather sectional sofa with a yellow pillow and a white throw, a small round side table, and a gallery wall with various framed pictures and decorative items. The floor in the green room has dark, multicolored tiles.

While some of her clients may shy away from pink, Dewhirst does not. “I painted this stairwell coral because I like it,” she states simply. / Photo by Tom Couture

Left side: A cozy corner with a woven rattan chair, a pink vase holding pink lilies, and a mint green wall adorned with six framed artworks in various sizes and colors. A wooden door with glass panels is partially visible. Right side: A hallway with pink trim, a pink door, and a pink stair railing. A striped rug with pink, orange, and purple tones runs along the wooden floor. Pink roller skates rest near the wall, and a small oval mirror hangs beside the door. A glimpse of a blue bathroom with a round mirror is visible through an open doorway.

Photos by Tom Couture

Next came infusing those plans with a riot of color. Just not blue. “There’s no blue in the house, because every client loves blue,” Dewhirst says. “I have plenty of opportunity to use blue at work, so I wanted to scratch all the other itches I don’t get to scratch doing work for other people.”

The itches in question? Pinks, red, black, purple, and green—specifically “ugly green.” “The living room is called wasabi, and I just love that color,” she says. “I know a lot of people hate it, but I don’t care. I could swim in it.”

In the green living room, the all-coral hallway, the brown primary bedroom, the black kitchen, and other rooms, the same color splashes the walls, trim, doors, and more. It’s a trend referred to as color-drenching today, but Dewhirst maintains she’s been going all in on one color since elementary school. “I love color-drenching because it allows you to get away with colors that might feel too crazy when you put them next to white,” she says.

Arched doorway with a black frame leading from a dark kitchen with wooden cabinets and brass handles into a bright room featuring a red chair, a round wooden table, beige curtains, a tall arched window with a view of green trees, and a framed artwork on the wall. The floor in the bright room is light-colored and reflective.

The kitchen floor incorporates strips of black marble with white veining; the design is based off an Anni Albers weaving. / Photo by Tom Couture

Two beds with striped pillows and blue blankets flank a dark green round nightstand. On the nightstand are a small clock, a book, and a toy car. The wall behind the beds is painted green on the lower half and features wallpaper with black and white sketches of various objects on the upper half. Above the beds are four framed pictures: a landscape painting, a portrait of a person, a green panel with hooks, and a colorful poster with the text "EARTH Your Oasis in Space." A green wall-mounted lamp is on the left side.

Whimsical wallpaper and framed original art bedecks one of the guest bedrooms. / Photo by Tom Couture

A vintage-style bathroom corner features a white sink with brass faucets and a wooden brush. Above the sink is a gold-framed mirror with an ornate top. The walls are decorated with pastel floral wallpaper in shades of green, pink, and blue, with a decorative molding border separating the wallpaper from the solid taupe lower wall. A brass towel ring holds a purple and white striped towel. Two framed black-and-white portraits hang on the wall, one in a gold ornate frame and the other in a simpler gold frame with a plant vine draped over it. A brass wall sconce with pink tassels is mounted above the sink.

Shades of muted purple grace this colorful powder room lit partially by a sun tunnel in the ceiling. / Photo by Tom Couture

To amp up the pigments throughout the house, natural light was key. “I avoid lamps at all costs,” Dewhirst says, so she spent the most time lining windows up across rooms to maximize cross breezes and sunlight. Every bedroom, for example, has windows on at least three walls. Elsewhere, there are five “sun tunnels” that pipe sunlight into darker spaces. Installed like ductwork, these mirrored tubes connect a domed window on the exterior with a recessed light-like portal on the interior. The powder room, for one, lacks windows, so there’s a sun tunnel in the ceiling. “In the middle of the day, you can still use that bathroom without turning the lights on,” Dewhirst says.

More vivid hues shine through in the home’s wallcoverings and tilework. In one bedroom, white-and-red poppy wallpaper covers the ceiling; it’s a design Dewhirst purchased almost 10 years ago, knowing she’d use it somewhere in her home one day. Meanwhile, the primary bathroom’s pale salmon, rust, and marigold tiles mimic a common weaving pattern—one Dewhirst often follows while working in her first-floor art and weaving studio.

A cozy bedroom corner features a window seat with a red cushion and three pillows: one floral, one striped, and one round green. The walls are painted gray with a red radiator beneath a black and white abstract portrait. The ceiling and upper wall area are decorated with floral wallpaper in red, green, and black on a white background. Yellow curtains frame the window, and the bed in the foreground has white striped bedding with orange and pink blankets and pillows.

Because Dewhirst bought the poppy wallcovering years ago, there was a finite amount to work with. Her installer finished with nearly 3 inches to spare. / Photo by Tom Couture

A cozy study room with dark green built-in bookshelves filled with books and decorative items. A wooden desk with a matching chair is centered on a pink, black, and white geometric tiled floor. A mounted deer head is displayed above the shelves in the middle, flanked by a wooden arched door with glass panels. On the right side, there is a vintage-style wooden loveseat with pink upholstery. Two adjustable wall lamps with white shades extend over the desk area.

Wallpaper is used in every other room—like in this study—so guests aren’t viewing a competing wallpapered room through the door.

A small kitchenette with bright red cabinetry and matching red shelves holding mugs, glassware, and labeled canisters for coffee, tea, and sugar. The backsplash features a geometric tile pattern in soft pink and white. A brass faucet is installed over a small sink, and a red and white striped towel hangs from the cabinet. The space is framed by red arched doorways, with a red ceiling light fixture above. The adjacent rooms visible through the arches have contrasting dark and light color schemes.

A cherry-red pantry is flanked by soaring rounded doorways and topped with a colorful sconce. / Photo by Tom Couture

Color extends to the home’s vintage-inspired features, too. Each bedroom has an antique radiator refinished to match the room’s palette—the radiators are secondary heat sources in addition to the property’s geothermal radiant heat. Rounded doorways and trim also get the rainbow treatment in red, orange, pink, and more. As for other new-old elements, there’s a dumbwaiter that brings groceries from the garage up to the kitchen, as well as a laundry chute connecting the primary bedroom to the laundry room in the basement.

Throughout the process, Dewhirst reveled in making bold design decisions that typical clients would shy away from. “The number of electricians and plumbers who came through and were like, ‘I love this pink hallway!’” she recounts. “I was like ‘Haha! I knew it!’ I think that people put so many restrictions on themselves. Maybe they just need an example because they can’t imagine what it might look like.” As for this example? She’s living it.

Sunlit room with mint green walls and large wooden-framed windows, featuring a white cushioned wicker sofa with floral and striped pillows, a colorful ornate wooden chest as a coffee table, various potted plants, a wicker rocking chair with a striped pillow, and a small round side table with a pink vase of flowers. The ceiling has exposed beams with skylights, and the room overlooks a green landscape with trees and a body of water in the distance.

Dewhirst always envisioned having a greenhouse attached to her home. It’s “the anti-seasonal depression room,” she says, “because you can come out here and get some sunlight.” / Photo by Tom Couture