Design with South Beach Splash (continued)
Nisi Berryman, founder of Miami’s NIBA Home showroom, conceived a bubbly palette for her 1950s bungalow that suits her personality to a T
Berryman bought this house -- where she lives with her 16-year-old artist son, Keith Richard Clougherty (a junior at Design & Architecture Senior High School) -- in 1993. Back then, she was a pioneer in what is now a highly desirable single-family enclave within Miami Beach's Palm View Historic District. The neighborhood is just north of the bustle of the city's famed Lincoln Road and boasts its share of Mediterranean and art deco houses, along with midcentury bungalows such as Berryman's, which was built in 1950.
For lovers of great design finds, the location is a handy one when the Lincoln Road Flea Market sets up on alternate winter Sundays. And Berryman's house bears witness to her keen eye. She purchased many of her tables, chairs and accent pieces at resale venues and reinvented them for her idiosyncratic brand of festive Florida design. The Mississippi-born Berryman (who happens to be Metropolitan Home's Miami city editor) is the owner of NIBA Home in the Miami Design District, so of course her own showroom is well represented here, with sophisticated rugs, an inventive dining table and the kind of unique accessories that make her emporium so popular with designers and the general public alike.
Before opening NIBA Home four years ago, Berryman had worked in New York City with Dakota Jackson, and in Miami with Richard Plumer and Tui Pranich. Then, in 2000, she had a chance to open Miami's Holly Hunt showroom. "But I'd never been able to afford the stuff I was selling," she laughs. For years, her house was "more restrained" in design, says Berryman, but her recent two-year renovation changed all that. Working with a contractor, she moved walls and added floorboards and valances. She opted to create a series of small, well-defined and self-contained spaces in order to provide -- in an 1,100-square-foot house -- rooms to meet her small family's needs. Thus there are two bedrooms, a tiny "media room," living and dining rooms, and of course a kitchen and two baths. (If they need more room, Nisi, Keith and Buddy repair to the deck out back.)
And then she painted, and painted -- and painted. In the final, finished version, the walls are covered in an array of hues from "a very deep chartreuse" in the living room to violet in the dining room and red in her bedroom. The rooms are tied together by the ebonized wood floors, which all have a seductively dark sheen. With paint, Berryman let her unorthodox way with a color chart lead the way to wilder choices. The dining room, which is open to the living room, started out orange but wound up Ralph Lauren's Nairobi Dusk.
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