PROFILE – JULY 2008

By Joshua Bodwell

Photography Darren Setlow

A Rockport designer who nurtures the old with a touch of the new

Half a dozen French armoires crowded the room. Tables were stacked high atop one another, willy-nilly, and practically blocked the sunlight cascading in from the windows. As interior designer Deborah Chatfield remembers it, the chateau-like Louisiana home of her mentor, Jane Fleniken, overflowed with fine French antiques.

“Jane’s house was a place where I sat and just absorbed a lifestyle,” says the bright-eyed 50-year-old Chatfield today. “I was fascinated, and as I sat there I realized, ‘Look, you can do this…you can make a living out of this.’”

Today, Chatfield’s own interior design career has been based nearly as much on instinct as on her studied approach. Like another of her creative influences, the Belgian designer Axel Vervoordt, Chatfield has a gift for mixing modern-day and traditional with an eclectic touch that is at once considered yet casual.

Deborah Chatfield began her formal training in the interior design program at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, but marriage and the arrival of her first child intervened, and she wasn’t able to finish her degree. While raising her children, Chatfield slaked her thirst to design by tackling major overhauls of her two homes. It was also around this same time that she fell under the spell of Fleniken, and it was not long before friends who had seen Chatfield’s work on her own homes were calling and saying, “Do ours, please!”

In the 1990s, Chatfield took a brief career detour as she owned and operated a women’s apparel boutique in Louisiana. But after the three-year lease on the storefront was up, she promptly closed the doors. “I hated the hours,” remembers Chatfield, “and I also realized that my favorite part of the whole venture took place before I actually opened…when I was designing the store!” During the same period, Chatfield had vacationed in Maine, fallen in love with the state, and purchased a gentleman’s farm in Union. When her marriage dissolved in 1999, Chatfield moved north permanently.

Remarried, resettled in Rockport, and ready to return to interior design, Chatfield applied to New York City’s Sheffield School of Interior Design in 2005. Working vigorously, she managed to finish a three-year course of study in just a single year. “It gave me an incredible education about the business side of design,” she remembers of the program, “but my teacher also really pushed me into approaching every project with the idea of making the design the best I could make it, whether it was country French or contemporary or anything else.”

In 2006, with the encouragement of her husband, Kim, Chatfield opened a storefront for Chatfield Design on the bridge of Rockport’s Main Street. Today, she runs her design business from the space and carries a selection of furniture, fabrics, and wallcoverings. The cozy store also brims with Chatfield’s other passion: art. A peek into the nooks and crannies reveals one treasure after another: a Paul Caponigro photograph, a sculpture by Brian White, or a sketch from the notebook of Stephen Pace. A longtime art history enthusiast,

Chatfield sits on the board of trustees at the Farnsworth Art Museum, and currently chairs the committee that that organized last month’s gala to present artist Will Barnet with the museum’s Maine in America Award. “I am still blown away by the quality of the Farnsworth and the fact that it’s right here in Maine,” she says.

Chatfield’s own artistic inclinations are on display in her work with furniture. She has a passion for restoring and reupholstering vintage furniture, and she prides herself on finding the perfect antique textile for each piece. “For me, art and fabric are seamless,” she says. “Furniture is like a blank canvas and what you apply to it is like the paint.” Chatfield is actually on the cusp of launching her own furniture line, which will include beds, bureaus, tables, end tables, armchairs, and sofas. To accommodate the new venture, she is planning to break through the ceiling of her shop and expand onto the second floor.

Putting aside her furniture and fabric skills, when asked what she considers to be her strongest attribute as a designer, Chatfield answers with one word: “Color.” The response is not a reflection of a high self-opinion, but an acknowledgment of the commitment she makes to finding that elusive “right” color for every job—even if it means painstakingly mixing paint by hand for hours, then painting a board and leaving it on the passenger seat of her car for days so she can see it every imaginable light. “Color is the most fun,” she says, pausing for a moment before adding, “because the right color can tell you a lot about a person’s inner personality.”

So how does an interior designer discover colors that can speak to a client’s personality? “By listening,” says Chatfield. “Listening is probably the most important part of my job.”

No matter the colors (bright or dark), no matter the style (contemporary or traditional), and no matter the geography (Louisiana or Maine), the essential quality that guides all of Chatfield’s designs is timelessness. “I am constantly hearing something Jane used to say,” remembers Chatfield of her mentor. “She used to say, ‘The good gets better…but the bad only gets worse.’”
On the wall in Chatfield Design, up near the ceiling, four simple words are written out in gold italic lettering: “good design always lasts…”