Mattye Dewhirst, an interior designer, recently built her dream home
Photos by Tom Couture
Walking into The Black Iris is to walk into a color-drenched tapestry, where one room threads into the next, each with its own distinctive colorway, collectively weaving together the story of one woman’s dream home.
That woman would be Mattye Dewhirst, and The Black Iris is the Victorian-style home she designed and built off Main Road in Tiverton, where it sits on 2.69 acres of land overlooking Nanaquaket Pond.
Painted a dark gray with black trim, the home stands three stories and has a partial wrap-around porch. The first-floor windows visible from the street are arched, a design that’s repeated throughout the interior. The front door is a shade of light green on the outside, and violet on the inside, where it gives way to a small mudroom painted green. The top third of the mudroom walls are accented with custom-cut wallpaper — offering a taste of what’s to come — in the shape of foxglove flowers in hues of pink and violet.
Beyond the mudroom is the foyer and main stairwell, painted entirely in soft pink. Depending on which way you go — toward the living room or the dining room, upstairs or down — you’ll meet a different color palette across the walls, in the curation of art, or the pattern of tiles beneath your feet. “I’ve always been into color,” says Dewhirst, recalling a time from her childhood when she matched her nightgowns to her bedroom walls. “I had to coordinate with the room … that’s my first memory of being nuts,” she says, smiling.
We’re sitting at her kitchen table, in a room painted from floor to ceiling a shade of green-black, sunlight streaming in from the length of the house facing the pond, the room warm and bright despite any assumption that black walls make for a dark or dimly lit space. Above me hangs a painting by her grandmother and a vintage sign from her dad’s family’s dairy in Connecticut; two of many eclectic elements woven throughout the home.
The kitchen is one of many rooms Dewhirst says she hopes can be an example to future clients of what is possible, not only for using bold color, but for utilizing color-drenching, which is the art of painting an entire space, from the moldings to the ceiling, the same shade. The practice, says Dewhirst, is much more soothing than when a room is broken up with molding painted one color (say, white) and walls another, which makes for high contrast.
Color-drenching was big in the ’90s, an era enjoying a cultural and stylistic resurgence. As Dewhirst notes, Monica and Rachel’s apartment in “Friends” was color drenched in purple. The longer something has been in rotation, the more likely it is to stay in style, she explains.
“The more times in history we’ve seen a style, the less likely it is to go outward,” she says.
A crayon drawing & a dream
When Dewhirst was a child, she remembers using crayons to draw a house — specifically a house with a mansard roof — that resembled a neighboring home. Her brother’s then-girlfriend, now wife, commented on how detailed the depiction was.
The image stayed with Dewhirst and became the rough draft for what is now The Black Iris.
When she was in high school, “The Sims” computer game was popular. While peers played the game to build complete worlds, Dewhirst used it to design and construct homes and interiors. Impressed, her father bought AutoCAD, a software program used to create 2D and 3D drawings, blueprints, and models. Dewhirst spent hours after school at her desk using the software, she recalls, and her fascination and focus never waned.
“I’ve had some version of AutoCAD on my computer since 2002,” she says.
But it wasn’t immediately obvious to the teenager that she could take classes in interiors and designs in college. “I didn’t know that interior design was a job,” she says.
Dewhirst ended up studying visual art at North Carolina State University, where she was introduced to weaving and loom work, which became a lifelong interest and, eventually, an influence on her approach to interior design.
After college, Dewhirst worked in the gallery of The Society of Arts and Crafts. It was established in Boston in 1897, and her mother, Alyda Dewhirst, was a past president and trustee. Through that job, Dewhirst met many crafters she later would commission to build custom designs for her Tiverton home.
She has been a self-employed designer since 2012, when she graduated from the Residential Interior Design program at Boston Architectural College. Building her own business was slow going at first, she says. Word-of-mouth referrals, often through family and friends, helped her to assemble a portfolio.
Her first big project came about in 2016, when she purchased an abandoned single-family home in East Boston. “It needed to be completely gutted,” she says of the house, which was built circa 1912 and where she lived for nine years.
Dewhirst purchased the Tiverton property in 2019 and worked with a family friend to turn her AutoCAD drawings into more detailed blueprints. The Black Iris, as it stands today, is very much in line with the dream home she long envisioned.
After breaking ground in 2023, Dewhirst and her partner and soon-to-be husband Tom Couture moved into the house in the spring of 2025. They plan to be married on the property in June. (It’s worth noting that their cat, Kanga, is the perfect size for the cushioned window seat in the stairwell that overlooks the backyard and pond beyond.) Mello Construction Co. of Bristol built the house. Dewhirst says she met Robert “Wayne” Mello through her parents, who live in Bristol, and previously worked with him on a project.
From one room to the next
“Transitions were really important to me,” says Dewhirst, noting how colors shift from one room to the next. For instance, the wallpaper in the chartreuse-colored living room includes a shade of pink that is reflected in the pink of the foyer, and which becomes a shade of red in the dining room.
“If you’re sitting there [on the living room couch] and look across, it goes in steps,” she says of the color progression.
If you turn toward the sunroom, the bright green of the living room becomes the mint green of the solarium. Whatever direction you choose to walk, you move through a colorway that intentionally transitions into a related but distinctive color palette.
Many of the distinctive designs encountered throughout the house reflect ideas Dewhirst held onto for years and showcase decor she acquired years ago and saved for the right moment. She acquired light fixtures, collected artwork, and catalogued paint colors long before The Black Iris was a reality; one bedroom is decorated with poppy wallpaper she purchased a decade ago.
“Most of the floors were decided pretty early,” she says. Villa Lagoon Tile, a company based in Gulf Shores, Alabama, is the source of the Zellige tiles in the sunroom and other areas of the home. Dewhirst first discovered the handcrafted Moroccan tiles, which are made of local clays fired in kilns fueled by olive pits, during a trip to the North African nation when she was 14. She vividly remembers the pattern adorning a local courtyard, which inspired her sunroom design, she says.
In the living room, a handful of different shaded Zellige tiles are peppered throughout an otherwise dark, gray-black tile, all leftover from a sampling she had previously sourced. The pattern mimics a satin weave structure that Dewhirst used as both inspiration and guide. “It looks random, but isn’t,” she says.
Weaving patterns or details also inspired the tile design on the kitchen floor and in the master bath, where there is radiant heat beneath. Some tiles were inspired by a trip to Cuba in 2015, says Dewhirst, whose mother is Cuban.
Sprinkled throughout the house are old family photographs, many saved from a fire that broke out in her East Boston home the day after Dewhirst closed on the Tiverton property. Thoughtful first responders removed the photos from the walls and left them in a safe room. She later dropped by the local firehouse with Cuban food to express her gratitude.
Some elements of The Black Iris came into place as the house took shape. A stained-glass window in the entry stairwell was made by neighbors who live across the street. A local artist painted a portrait of the house and gifted it to Dewhirst, while another woman brought by a bag of black iris bulbs she had dug up from her own garden.
The chairs in her dining room were sourced from three different vendors and upholstered in the same red fabric. She found four of them via an Amish woodworker in Canada, says Dewhirst, and drove across the border to collect them.
She found another chair, a vintage olive-green leather piece designed by the late Arne Norell of Sweden, on Facebook Marketplace in Berlin. It perfectly complements the chartreuse colorway of the living room, Dewhirst says, so she flew to Europe after realizing it would be cheaper to bring it back as checked luggage than to have it shipped. She booked inexpensive flights last summer and flew to Berlin with a friend, who helped her find and transport the chair back to the states.
But Dewhirst’s attention to detail extends beyond walls, windows, floors, and furniture. “I wanted the ceiling in each room to have something interesting,” she says.
So there’s a curve in the living room that mimics the arches that appear throughout the house, an ornate molding in the dining room, custom skylights in the sunroom, and a wallpapered ceiling in a guest bedroom.
There are too many details throughout the house to name them all. I’ve yet to mention the sun tunnel in the powder room off the foyer, or the hand painted tiles in a guest bath, or the cushioned nook with the dreamiest of views in a guest room, or the minibar connecting the dining room with the study.
And then there’s the laundry room — complete with chute — in the basement, and the weaving room turned into Couture’s office (the only entirely white-walled room in the house), and den accented with pops of psychedelic colors and a collection of guitars.
Suffice it to say every room has a talking point.
Dewhirst says she hopes to use the house as a showcase of what interior design can look like. When people walk through, she wants them to realize they too can have a pink bathroom, or a wasabi-green living room, or a dining room painted entirely dark blue.
“A part of what I wanted to accomplish with this house is having big examples of ‘Yes, I can!’,” says Dewhirst, noting that many visitors, including manly contractors, have expressed the same sentiment: “This is really cool.”
