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.
