Faded and timeworn, the black-and-white photo preserved between glass plates and displayed in a place of pride may be a treasured family heirloom, but it belies Nina and Pieter Taselaar’s Palm Beach story. The image, captured during the 1929 honeymoon of Nina’s grandparents, hints at the tropical paradise that is the town. However, its washy monochrome hides the playful cheeriness that marks the couple’s modern-day reality of a home bursting at the seams with family, friends, joy, and color. Lots of color.
Nina grew up visiting Palm Beach from her New York home and has always been acquainted with the town’s charms, but Dutch-born Pieter didn’t discover them until business brought him here in 2001.
“My parents used to rent different apartments, and I also had friends whom I would visit in the good old days,” Nina says. “But I never could have predicted that I’d live here.”
For Pieter, it was love at first sight. The couple—who met as graduate students at Columbia University and moved between Manhattan; the Netherlands; Westchester, New York; and Newport, Rhode Island—bought a home on North Lake Way to spend holidays and school breaks with their young daughters. “He just couldn’t believe that paradise was only a two-and-a-half-hour flight from New York,” Nina says.
In fact, on such a flight years later, Nina made an acquaintance who would shape her world in ways she never imagined.
In 2014, the Taselaars made an offer on a different Palm Beach property: an 8,300-square-foot, Mediterranean-style home with a limestone facade that Nina adored. At the time, they were living in a rental in the city, having purchased a five-story townhome a few years earlier that they were planning to renovate and make their home base after selling their place in Newport. But with the purchase of their new Palm Beach abode, the couple had a second property to renovate—and the promise of a new home base.
A short time later, Nina boarded a flight from New York to Palm Beach to see what needed to be done with the house. “I got on the plane and who is sitting next to me?” she asks with eyes twinkling. “Mr. Carleton Varney.”
She struck up a conversation with the interior decorator, designer, and author known as “Mr. Color.” Varney began working at the Dorothy Draper & Company design firm in 1958, eventually serving as its president and owner. He’s known for his work at luxury hotels across the country including Palm Beach’s The Breakers, The Colony, and The Brazilian Court as well as private residences for presidents, governors, celebrities, and royalty. Varney, who lived in Palm Beach and passed away in 2022, also ran a textile company whose fabrics and wallcoverings remain popular today.
“I’d seen him lecture once in Newport and once at The Greenbriar,” says Nina, who’d never formally met Varney before the flight but had always had an interest in fashion, design, fabrics, and colors. Even so, the prospect of renovating the Palm Beach house and the New York City townhome at the same time overwhelmed her. “So, I said, ‘Hi, Mr. Varney,’ and proceeded for two-and-a-half hours to tell him my life story.”
The tale included her childhood exposure to his style. In the 1950s, Nina’s Aunt Alice decorated the living room of her Mamaroneck, New York, home in the style of Varney and his mentor, Dorothy Draper, complete with emerald-green carpet and a velvet rope. “She was obsessed with it, and no one was allowed in,” Nina says—and admits to trespassing and admiring how the rich colors made her feel.
Nina recalls Varney’s hearty laugh and how he’d suggested she and Pieter join him at The Colony the next day, where they arranged to show him the house. Back in New York, he visited the townhome. Soon, both projects were underway.
In New York, Varney leaned into the moody, using navy carpeting and lacquering the walls of one room blue and another a deep purple. By contrast, the Taselaars’ Palm Beach home is a study in bright, tropical whimsy that also feeds a sense of tradition. Varney was gifted in repurposing pieces from former properties and ferreting out fortunate finds, like the dining room set that was once in Elton John’s London residence.
The designer invited Nina, Pieter, and their two daughters to his home in Shannon, Ireland. The family had a fantastic time, with Varney taking them to dog races, horse stables, and local pubs. Their overarching goal was to visit the company that would manufacture the rugs that Varney custom designed to offset their Palm Beach home’s clean-lined limestone floors and the wall mural hand-painted by artist Jadranko Ferko.
Nina believes the trip cemented their friendship and her commitment to audacious design, though she admits to changing some of the original Varney finishes over the years. The kitchen, for instance, has been recently updated. And the family room’s wallpaper of fluffy white clouds on a bright blue sky has been replaced by a textural, natural-toned wallcovering. The clouds, Nina thinks, “were a little much.”
The primary bedroom, however, is pink top to bottom, with lattice painted on the ceiling and tropical fronds on the draperies. Nina says her favorite spot in the house is in a lounge chair in that room, where she can read, talk on the phone, and relax. She reports that when the family asks, “Where’s Mommy?” The answer is always, “She’s in her corner.”
When friends ask how Pieter can sleep in such a pink-drenched space, Nina says that he “turns off the light, shuts his eyes, and gets up in the morning and goes into his dark hole.”
Pieter’s home office is decidedly not a hole, but rather masculine with dark finishes, family heirlooms, and sailing trophies. Pieter’s Team Bliksem is a U.S.-based sailing crew that flies under the Dutch flag. Its champion credits include the M32 fleet European Championship in 2022, the M32 U.S. National Championship in 2021, and the M32 World Championship in 2009.
Pieter is the founding partner and CEO of Lucerne Capital Management, an investment firm based in Greenwich, Connecticut, that specializes in European equities. His work and his sailing keep him busy traveling, but while in Palm Beach, he and Nina play golf at The Breakers, spend time at The Beach Club, and entertain friends both out and at home.
Last November, the Taselaars hosted one of the dinner parties that comprise a philanthropic evening known as the Ultimate Dinner Party, which benefits the Children’s Home Society of Florida. They so enjoyed the experience that they’ve offered to host the cocktail party that will kick off this year’s event. Nina is motivated to support the Children’s Home Society because it’s a cause close to her heart. She’s spent her career as a Manhattan-based psychologist specializing in couples and family therapy and appreciates the work the nonprofit does.
Most often, though, the house is a feel-good place for family. The Taselaars’ now-grown daughters, Amanda and Claudia, visit frequently. Together with their husbands and children—Claudia has a 1-year-old son and Amanda gave birth to a baby boy this summer—they stay in sumptuous bedrooms, each with a different colored door that hints at what lies beyond.
Amanda and Claudia followed in their father’s footsteps as sailors, both competing in U.S. Sailing events throughout their teenage years and earning captain positions on Georgetown University’s sailing teams. The upstairs foyer near the guest rooms boasts an oversize antique display cabinet that’s been shipped from Pieter’s family home in the Netherlands. It holds a model ship and evidence of the family’s maritime history that dates to the sixteenth century. In Palm Beach, Pieter has a Hobie Cat for leisure outings. In East Hampton, the family has a “shacky kind of beach house,” as Nina describes it, where they visit for a few weeks each summer and spend time on the water. Their cheerful Palm Beach home, however, is where the heart is.
“I never get tired of it,” Nina says. “I just walk in and feel a lift. It just feels good.”
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