DREAM TEAM

For one lucky family, design stars Jeremiah Brent and Athena Calderone paired up to craft a chic beach retreat in Rhode Island

- CATHERINE HONG

For interior design fanboys and fangirls, the idea that someone could somehow hire both Jeremiah Brent and Athena Calderone to design their house is an exercise in daydreaming. With his reputation for creating elegantly soulful interiors, AD100 talent Brent is as in-demand as celebrity designers get-and that was true even before he became the newest cast member of Netflix's Queer Eye. As for Calderone, the domestic goddess and Instagram star whose Brooklyn town house launched precisely one zillion copycat renos, well, she doesn't even take on interior design clients. (Her one client being, basically, herself.) In other words, getting Brent and Calderone to team up on a house is like drafting Ronald Acuña Jr. and Shohei Ohtani on the same baseball team-the stuff of fantasy decorating leagues.

And yet in this case, a husband and wife with a deep love of design somehow really did score the Brent/Calderone dream team. And they say they owe it all to their affection for a single material: plaster.

The couple, who live most of the year in Connecticut and have three school-age children, had been working with Kamp Studios, the vaunted plaster workshop, on sprucing up their main residence. "We became obsessed with the transformative power of plaster and the way it adds softness and depth to surfaces," says the wife. "As we kept adding more and more, we became friendly with Kamp's co-owner, Kim Collins." In late 2020, when the couple purchased a beach home in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, they began using Collins as an informal sounding board in their hunt for designers. "We had been a fan of Athena's for a long time and we knew Kim had done a lot of work with her," says the wife. "One day I said to Kim, 'Is there a world in which you think Athena would ever take on a design project?""