Full-service remodelers Tara Mangini and Percy Bright of Jersey Ice Cream Co. are vagabonds who move where their work is and live in their project until it’s done. Not long ago, they holed up for eight months in an 18th-century Catskills farmhouse that had been done up in an incongruous mix of heavy wood furniture and disco-era purples and oranges. Its NYC-based owners, Gideon Friedman and Rachael Bedard (he’s in real estate, she’s a doctor), told Tara and Percy to turn it into the sort of place where Wes Anderson would go as a creative escape. They pointed to some Arts & Craft wallpaper of angels and devils and encouraged them to let loose: “think color and pattern and vintage.” The results" Let’s just say movie set design and decoration might well be the couple’s next calling. Photography by Beth Kirby of Local Milk (who has a Jersey Ice Cream Co. kitchen; see The One-Month Makeover).

Above: Tara and Percy’s first move" “We cleared out the forest of furniture?a very nice dealer came and took it all, even the things he didn’t want”?and we primed all the walls, so we could finally see what we had.” They then performed a complete makeover in every room, starting with the front parlor, shown here. It has two-toned pigmented plastered walls, a specialty of Percy’s that took years to master, and a collection of artwork and vintage furnishing, all of it gathered by Tara for a song R...