Blue & White
Decorating

There is no coastal palette older, or more forgiving, than blue and white. It arrived on the island three centuries ago in the holds of clipper ships — jars and ginger pots and tureens traded out of Canton — and it has never really left. Walk down any lane in 'Sconset in July and you'll see it in ten steps: hydrangeas foaming against the shingles, a striped awning over a screen door, a pair of Chinese jars on a scrubbed pine hutch.

The reason it endures is simple. Blue and white is a rest for the eye. It borrows from the harbor, the hydrangea hedge, and the four-o'clock sky and echoes them indoors so the rooms never feel disconnected from the view outside. A ticking-stripe pillow tempers a slipcovered sofa. A single ginger jar anchors a mantel that had been trying, and failing, for a year. A chinoiserie garden stool becomes a side table by the front door.

What we call one palette is really a small family of blues — the hazy cornflower of the Delft potters, the deep cobalt of a summer night off Great Point, the powdery blue of a Nantucket shutter that has weathered thirty winters. Set any one of them against chalky, unbleached white, and a room begins to look composed without ever looking decorated. What follows is that room, told in six chapters — and the pieces we would use to build each one.