If there's a moral here to the story of Paddy Dugan's house, it's this: It never hurts to ask for what you want.
After several years of living in a cramped apartment in Roland Park, she was literally ready to get out of town. But instead of just dreaming of a country cottage, she decided to go after one.
She put up a notice on the bulletin board of a popular antiques and gift shop in northern Baltimore county: Wanted House to Rent. And then she waited. And waited.
But finally, after about five months, the telephone rang. The man on the line said he had an old two-bedroom stone cottage to rent.
"I asked did it have a fireplace?" she recalls. "He said it did. 'But,' I said, 'Is it a nice fireplace?' He said it was pretty nice."
So she went out to see the place and nearly fell over at what she found, a 200-year-old, stone-and-clapboard cottage with a beautiful stone fireplace so old that it still had an iron crane in it from the days when pots of stew hung there simmering over an open fire.
There was just one drawback -- actually two. The place was a wreck, with cobwebs everywhere, peeling wallpaper and dirty, flaking paint. And what's worse, she couldn't afford the rent he was asking. "I had just turned to walk away when he said, 'Wait a minute,' " she says. He said he would reduce the rent for a year if she would fix the place up.
As an interior decorator, she didn't need any more encouragement. "I knew the house had potential when I saw it," she says. "It has a lot of character, I think, and that is one of my favorite things to do, to jump into a project like that because you see such great results, especially with paint. It's relatively quick and it makes a tremendous change.
"This is called the Davisville stone cottage," she says, standing in the kitchen of what now, five months later, looks like something out of House Beautiful. "It apparently was built in the late 1700s as a tenant house to the main house."
The house is in two parts, she explains. A later addition was added to the stone half of the cottage.
The kitchen was one of her biggest challenges. "The wallpaper looked like it was put up when the house was first built. It was white with little, teeny, yellow dots and it was peeling and it was dirty and everything. Plus you had these screaming yellow counter tops and the floor -- this tile doesn't even go with the counters. It's sort of off."
She did what few of us would have had the courage to do. She decided to paint the walls a dark teal green.
"I told my landlord I wanted to paint it dark green and he was like, 'I don't think so.' I said, 'Trust me.'
"Sometimes you need to do something strong to make it work," she continues. "Dark green is a strong color but it worked, it covered everything up."
The kitchen had one asset, natural wood cabinets, not too old and in pretty good shape. Instead of painting them, she decided to leave them as they were. But now she had brilliant teal walls, vivid yellow counter tops and the natural wood. The final touch was what brought it all together -- a wide floral wallpaper border that she ran around the top of the walls and just underneath the cabinets, above the counter tops.
"The colors in the background of the border are the same tones as the wood cabinets. And the accents in the border are the same as the dark green wall," she says. "So it sort of ties it all together. And your eyes go there instead of to these screaming yellow counters. That toned it down a little bit."
The effect is almost magical, with the kind of interplay of tensions and resolutions that another interior decorator might create on purpose.
"It's not a big kitchen but I don't think the dark colors make it too small. I think it makes it more cozy. I was real pleased with it."
Dark green with white trim gives a very clean, crisp look, she continues, something you need in an older house.
There are echoes of the dark green color in other rooms throughout the house -- whose primary color scheme is dusty rose, dark green and cream or white.
The next room as you walk through the house is the dining room, painted a pale dusty rose and filled with a mix of antiques, folk art and contemporary furniture.
"I usually tell my clients that the way I do it is I go out and buy things that I just like. And I don't really think about what they're going to work with or where I'm going to put them but I always find a spot for everything. If you like everything that you have, it's all going to somehow work together."
Her old wooden dining table and chairs used to be in her family's kitchen. "There are crayon drawings from when I was a little kid underneath," she says.
Above it is a Shaker-style coat rack with plates on top and dried flower swags hung from the pegs.Against the opposite wall is a very contemporary Scandinavian teak desk with a folk art carrousel on top. "It's a folk art toy, no nails, it just works from the leverage of those ribbons," she says. "A lot of my friends have children and I wanted to have something for them to play with. So they put that on the floor and go to it. They can't really hurt it."
Next to the desk is a ficus tree covered with tiny white lights. She decorated it one year for Christmas and liked the effect so much she left it that way year round. "When you have a dinner party, it's great. You just light a whole lot of candles and leave those lights on and it's such a pretty room."
On still another wall she has hung a collection of antique china plates, something she learned to do from Anne Manley, an English decorator who until a few years ago lived and worked in Baltimore but has since moved back to England.
"I used to work with Anne Manley," she says. "She had no training or anything in interior design, but she just had this wonderful knack for it. And one of the things that she used to do was work with plates a lot because some of the china is just beautiful. These are English china and they're all different."
The hangers for the plates, she explains, are available at some of the larger local hardware stores. They come in different sizes, but are somewhat adjustable.
Beyond the dining room is the older part of the house: a small hallway with stairs leading to the second floor, and beyond that the living room with its ancient fireplace.
"It's such an airy room, I didn't want to put a lot of things in here," she says. The colors she used are a mix of pale pink, pale blue and green.
"I didn't sit down and plan the room. I've picked things I like and they work. Because it was getting too rosy-pinky, I put a lot of greens in here."
The sofa is a blue floral print, an upholstered chair is in pink. She painted an old rocking chair mauve. Green is added in a painted wicker side table, a yard sale find she transformed with paint and a glass top, and a green fireplace fan.
An old Irish country pine dovetailed trunk is used for storage.
Upstairs she has a workroom, a dressing room, her bedroom and the bath. The bedroom has a large antique pencil-post bed with a hand-knotted canopy. A fan quilt made by a grandmother who lived on the Eastern Shore covers the bed.
Old family antiques fill the bedroom and the dressing room next to it. Her workroom and office are filled with family photographs and all the things she can't bear to throw away, she says.
Ms. Dugan grew up in Baltimore, attended St. Paul's School and graduated from the Maryland Institute with a degree in interior design. After college, she worked for two years with Anne Manley, then worked with Papier Interiors and then Michael Asner Associates. She was an assistant set designer for the movie "Clara's Heart," and there are many things in her house that were used in the movie. "At the end of the movie they have an auction and you can get good deals on things," she says.
Currently she is working for the Store, Ltd. in the Village of Cross Keys and is also doing free-lance interior design, working primarily with people who don't have a lot of money to spend and who want to do a lot of the work themselves.
"I work with people instead of for them," she says. "I help them with resources and contacts. That way they can do as much as they want."
She is herself a dedicated do-it-yourselfer and her handiwork is everywhere throughout the house. She made all the curtains, many of the pillows, did dried flower topiaries and swags and even made quilts that are used as wall hangings and throws.
"I can see a lot of things about my grandmother that I do. I like to keep my fingers busy and my grandmother was like that. And I love to paint, obviously. She liked that. It's funny how some things you pass down through the family."