A ‘Romantic Idealist' Renovates a Derelict House on an Artist's Budget

New York Times

09-05-2025

Standing in his kitchen, with walls the color of green tea, Peter Daverington stops, closes his eyes and surrenders to Nina Simone's melancholy rendition of 'Mr. Bojangles,' a haunting lullaby of love and loss. He plays it twice.
'This song is about taking on hardships with grace,' he explains. 'Turning something ugly into something beautiful.'
He understands this well. As an Australian-born street artist turned landscape painter, and an accomplished Turkish ney — flute — player, Mr. Daverington, who is an acquaintance of mine, has dedicated his career to the enrichment of space and the pursuit of the sublime. As a recently divorced 51-year-old man, he has rebuilt his life by rehabilitating a derelict old house on a small lot in Esopus, N.Y.
'This house is healing medicine to me,' he said of the 1897 three-story vernacular just steps from the Hudson River. 'It is my deliverance from the darkest of nights and it's my phoenix rising.'
Mr. Daverington, known for his public works fusing old master sobriety with new urban swagger, renovated the house with the eye — and the wallet — of a working artist. Enlisting a contractor and designer was out of reach, so he did most of the work himself. Sourcing his materials from accessible vendors like Home Depot and Facebook Marketplace, he remodeled his home from a blank canvas of beams and studs to a historically detailed live/work studio.
Purchased as a two-family fixer-upper with his ex-wife for $60,000 in 2020, the house remained uninhabitable until the marriage ended two years later. With no other place to live, he moved into the owner's unit in 2022, camping out on the floor for a full year while struggling to work and pay bills.
'For a long time, I didn't know where my next dollar was coming from, because I rely on periodical sales of my paintings,' he revealed. 'I had to live like that and just felt defeated.'
With little savings, Mr. Daverington needed help with the down payment during the marriage and the equity buyout during the divorce. Simon Ford, a retired investment banker and longtime super-patron in Sydney, came to the rescue by commissioning a painting to provide funds for the initial purchase of the property and mobilized other Australian patrons to follow suit for the buyout.
'Artists particularly have trouble buying a house because they can never put the deposits together,' said Mr. Ford on a video call. In the background hung one of Mr. Daverington's commissions: a colossal $40,000 quadriptych based on Giovanni Boccaccio's 14th-century book The Decameron. 'Everyone needs a home, and we were happy to help.'
At the time of purchase, the house was covered in beige siding and dead vines, and the inside housed a warren of bleak rooms and fixtures awaiting demolition. 'The rooms had all been cut and chopped up, and I had to put all the character back in,' he said.
Out of necessity, Mr. Daverington addressed the kitchen and bathrooms first. He moved the location of the kitchen and installed basic white cabinets with butcher block countertops from Home Depot. He later painted them green. To complement the warmth of the laminated surfaces, he exposed and varnished the wooden beams in the ceiling, which raised the room height by several inches.
He added visual interest to the kitchen with a set of arched corner cabinets flanking a widened Greek Revival-style architrave enhanced by a pair of fluted columns. Having collected these elements from various thrift stores, lumberyards, and Facebook Marketplace, he unified the decorative pastiche with several coats of white paint.
For the primary bathroom, he wanted early 20th-century mosaic flooring but found the cost prohibitive. Instead, he bought sheets of black-and-white penny tile and methodically sequenced each tessera to form diamond-shaped patterns. The process took months.
He also mounted a vintage pedestal sink that he bought from an online seller for $100, and swapped the baseboard heater for a functional antique radiator, which required an overhaul of the plumbing system. Maintaining aesthetic consistency was worth the extra effort.
'I'm not a practical person,' he confessed. 'I'm a Romantic idealist.'
This philosophy is most evident in his upstairs hallway, which is being transformed into a panoramic, Zuber-style scene of the Hudson River Valley at sunset. With exacting detail and astonishing depth, his hand-painted mural evokes the landscapes of the Hudson River School, a deeply Romantic collective of 19th-century landscape painters who celebrated the intensity of emotion and the splendor of nature.
For a maximalist like Mr. Daverington, plain white walls beg for color, texture, and pattern. He has lacquered walls in phthalo green, burnished ceilings with Venetian plaster made of marble dust and lime, stretched old painted canvasses as wallpaper, and is currently hand painting a second bathroom in a repeating pattern of kookaburras, kangaroos, and koalas in a style he has named 'Australasiaoiserie.'
Walls also tell stories about the house's past. In what is now the guest bedroom, original lath and plaster smoothed over a rough brick insulation called nogging, had decayed in sections, and was coated in five layers of paint. Gentle application of a scraper revealed a floral lattice wallpaper, which he left as is, creating a distressed cottage-core atmosphere.
In addition to painted walls, he taught himself to make bluestone ones using the historical abundance of materials quarried in Ulster County. Inspired by Harvey Fite's Opus 40 in Saugerties, he used traditional techniques — no mortar — to build retaining walls, curved steps, garden niches, and a flagstone patio.
Avi Gitler, an art gallerist in Manhattan and neighbor in nearby West Shokan, N.Y., saw Mr. Daverington's masonry and hired him to build a sprawling stone terrace and fire pit to accommodate 'en plein air' retreats for artists at his home. 'Peter is such a Renaissance man,' said Mr. Gitler. 'He's a great musician, a great painter and street artist, and a hell of a builder.'
To date, Mr. Daverington estimates that he has spent $300,000 on his ongoing project. 'When I sell another painting, I'll put in reclaimed vintage flooring,' he said.
Since the job in West Shokan, Mr. Daverington has landed several more commissions to paint residential murals upstate, allowing him to carry on the ideals of his artistic predecessors in addition to paying for new renovations on his house.
'I have discovered my own America here in the Hudson Valley,' he said. 'I came here to pursue a career in contemporary art in New York City, but what I really discovered was New York State.'