Island of Her Heart — Celerie Kemble

Meet Celerie at Texas Design Week Houston at the New OKA Store

By Staff Report // May 13, 2021

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Celerie Kemble at Playa Grande

The bahia, a welcoming place for meals, cocktails and conversation, with a 30-foot aqua ceiling and Italian gessoed shell chairs.

The master bedroom in Celerie's bungalow with an iron bed reminiscent of the one she had as a child, but this one has tiny lights tucked into the leaves. Small reading lamps shaped like tulips hang over the headboard, and bedside tables are swiveling lily pads.

Changing the mood of a room with red torch ginger flowers echoed with big poppy-red Euro shams on bed.

A guest house at Playa Grande.

Celerie Kemble's new book, Island Whimsy, Designing a Paradise by the Sea

A guest house room where light pours in through five sets of shuttered doors and the tragaluz fretwork.

Celerie designed the tile in the bath.

The main house at Playa Grande.

An antique wicker chair coiled into fiddlehead ferns.

A guest bedroom with fanciful iron work.

This is not Celerie Kemble’s first beach romp. A fourth-generation Palm Beacher, Kemble heads up Kemble Interiors in NYC, while her mother, Mimi McMakin, leads Kemble Interiors in Palm Beach.

Kemble’s Palm Beach childhood home was a rambling deconsecrated Gothic church surrounded by jungle and overlooking Lake Worth. This was far from gilded Palm Beach, and it’s just the way Kemble designs her projects, from the Caribbean to Maine — filled with latticework, de Gournay wallpapers, hot Gauguin colors, coquina stone, and antique wicker.

When she fell madly in love with a beach, Playa Grande in the Dominican Republic, she knew she’d found her family’s Hyannis Port. She describes it as “a wild swath of mountainous jungle. . . rolling down to pastures of clear, wobbling minty-blue.”

Celerie Kimble at Playa Grande — Celerie Kemble at Playa Grande

Kemble’s new book, Island Whimsy: Designing a Paradise By the Sea (Rizzoli), follows her path to creating a stunning cluster of island houses centered around a shared clubhouse for family and friends. Magical.

ELIZABETH ANTHONY

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Celerie Kemble appears at Texas Design Week Houston for a talk, book signing, and cocktails Wednesday, May 19, 6 to 8 pm, at the new OKA store. TXDW is a ticketed event. Tickets and complete schedule, texasdesignweek.com.