The Tastemaker

Guiding the decorating desires of Newport socialites takes the skills of a diplomat as John Piexinho has discovered.

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More than a decade later, oatsie charles still remembers the taste of a dessert that John Peixinho baked, a sweet concoction of poached meringue floating on creme anglaise in a burnt sugar sauce. Peixinho hosted a dinner that night for their mutual friend, Betty Blake, and it marked the first time that Mrs. Charles—the doyenne of Newport society—saw the inside of the eighteenth-century house that Peixinho had restored. She loved what he had done with the house, which was a relief, because some houses (she says now, at age eighty-eight), “You’d rather be dead than have to go into.”

But not this one, the Spanish white colonial on Golden Hill. This house had “a certain atmosphere that’s very livable and very attractive,” she recalls. Later, Mrs. Charles contacted her host, “Fish,” (she calls him Fish because peixinho means fish in Portuguese), and told him “you’ll have to do a room for me.”

Peixinho said he’d love to help Mrs. Charles decorate a room in her house, a converted nine-car garage on the Land’s End estate that had once belonged to the novelist Edith Wharton. “I mean I’ve never thrown bait that was so quickly taken up, and so brilliantly, as Fish took this.”

Of course, Peixinho was thrilled to help Mrs. Charles decorate. At the time, he was in his early thirties and a manager in his father’s successful tuxedo rental business, and he was looking for something more interesting than counting cummerbunds, kerchiefs and bowties. So he helped Mrs. Charles overhaul what she called her Green Room, which featured walls covered in a rich green burlap. Peixinho decided to keep the burlap because he liked the texture, but he added recessed bookshelves, reupholstered a plush, pink easy chair in yellowish chinoiserie linen (for which he recently received major props from thepeakofchic.blogspot) and hung voluminous yellow silk curtains that evoke, he says, “the proportions of a party dress.”

Mrs. Charles loved what he did to the Green Room; word spread among friends. “And the rest,” she says, “is history.”

The arc of Peixinho’s rise from tuxedo store manager to one of the most sought-after interior designers in Newport and New York did not actually go as neatly as all that. Very few little boys say, “When I grow up, I want to be an interior designer,” and John Peixinho was no exception.

Peixinho was raised in the shadow of the Mount Hope Bridge in a part of Portsmouth called Bristol Ferry, a chummy little neighborhood with its own post office, even its own zip code, 02811. His family’s Dutch Colonial house stood on a lot that sloped down to the water, and he could swim from his front yard. His father ran a successful business tailoring uniforms for naval officers attending schools on the thriving Newport Navy Base, an enterprise that spawned two related businesses—tuxedo rentals and dry cleaning.

Around the time Peixinho was overhauling the Green Room for Oatsie Charles, his father gave him the dry cleaning business.

“I just hated it,” Peixinho says of his years in the dry cleaning business. “I hated everything about it.” So he sold that to nurture the little part-time antiques business he’d previously opened on Franklin Street; hence his design firm’s name, Franklin & Co.

Before the antiques store and the cleaning business and the tuxedo rentals were the two years as a third-grade teacher. He liked that, but it didn’t even pay his utility bills. Before that was a month at Edgehill rehabilitation center in order to kick an alcohol addiction.

Those dark days of the rehab center came half a lifetime ago. At the age of twenty-one, John Peixinho checked into Edgehill to dry out. He had wrecked a car driving home from the Newport nightlife to his parents’ house in Portsmouth, the latest calamity that had hit him since he began drinking in high school. So he spent thirty days at Edgehill, and unlike so many of those stories, his attempt at rehabilitation really worked. He learned that there is something about his body that does not metabolize alcohol, so he stopped drinking it. “I’m grateful that I got to deal with that at twenty instead of sixty,” he says now.

Peixinho’s grandfather, Leo Chabot, was an entrepreneurial spirit who liked buying houses. When Peixinho finished rehab, Chabot bought a rundown, eighteenth-century house on Golden Hill Street, near Newport’s Public Library, so John could move into it and fix it up.

“He really did think that if I had a project, I wouldn’t drink again,” Peixinho recalls.