“We were getting to an age when we were thinking about things like having a bathroom and a bedroom on the first floor, and those types of issues. We also realized we wanted to live in a different type of architecture,” she says.

The two loved the fairy-tale bungalows in the Southampton neighborhood, so Derry made a list of available properties for them to tour. Most of the houses they looked at had small rooms and too little space to accommodate their needs. Derry is an interior designer and an artist who kept a home studio; Martin, who is an art installer and a musician, has always had a recording studio at home. Although they talked about downsizing, they didn’t want to give up their studios.

Then Derry found the house they would come to call home. “It sits on a corner, and though it faces other homes, there are some commercial buildings on the side. I didn’t think it would work, but I took a look and fell in love with it,” Derry says. “From the outside, it looks like a typical south side bungalow, but inside, the rooms were super-sized — twice as big as other house we’d looked at.

“When Michael and I looked at it together he said, ‘This house has got it going on. We could live in this space.’ So we bought it,” she says.

Both of them thought the house was an ugly duckling aesthetically, but they’d dealt with ugly before. With ingenuity, grit and DIY energy, they had turned their three-story turn-of-the-20th-century home into a beautiful swan. They would do the same with their bungalow.

“Michael and I sometimes give a room a ‘glow-up’ which is what we did with the vintage 1937 master bath. It was in rough shape,” Derry says. Instead of tearing out the tile floor and tile walls, Derry tackled the walls first, hand painting every inch of the badly yellowed grout on the wall tiles a light cream using an angled eyebrow makeup brush.

“Every one of those pieces in the basket weave tile floor was laid by hand. It didn’t come pre-set like they do now on 12-inch sheets. This is a craftsman era-house with everything that name implies, and we wanted to honor that,” she says.

To salvage the floor, she bought black grout, then over-grouted the floor using the edge of a credit card, carefully filling the spaces. “It was a game changer,” she says. “Then we painted and got rid of the Band-aid colored ceiling. My brother, who is a woodworker, built us a new medicine cabinet using an original door we found stored away, so the woodwork matches perfectly.”

Derry applied similar thinking to renovating the kitchen. “We got a bid from a remodeling company to do the job, which came in at $32,000, but they couldn’t start for 3 months,” she says.

She and Martin decided to have a go at it. “I told him we could try painting the cabinets, and if it didn’t work we’d be out $50 for the paint and our time,” she says. “We splurged on the quartz countertops and ran them up as a full-height backsplash. I bought beautiful Italian cabinet hardware, which is one of my best tips as an interior designer. Good hardware is an inexpensive way to elevate space or a piece of furniture.” The work came in at $12,000, saving them $20,000 in the process.

“My personal philosophy is that your home should be like the museum of you filled with things you love. I believe in working with furniture and objects people have in their homes, not doing a clean sweep and starting from scratch,” she says.

They hung art in all the rooms, much of it from local artists they knew. They melded their styles in the furnishings. Derry loves to mix and match eras and styles in furnishings, while Martin leans toward midcentury modern pieces.

“Our homes are not show rooms, they’re spaces that are meant to be lived in,” Derry says. “If my client needs a dog bed in the corner of their living room I am a firm believer in designing the space that works for their lifestyle. There is a way to do it. You can have a beautiful home and still serve all those masters.”

Sharon Derry and Michael Martin

Ages • Derry is 62, and Martin is 60.

Family • Derry and Martin live with Snowpea, a flame-point Siamese cat.

Occupations • Derry is an interior designer and artist. Martin is the gallery manager and art handler at the Greenberg Gallery. He is also a musician and an art installer with his own company, M2Art.(tncms-asset)a0093276-ba43-5e88-a7f5-46793efd103a[4](/tncms-asset)(tncms-asset)c9debe1d-7ae6-5730-bcda-ebb02062c6e1[5](/tncms-asset)(tncms-asset)20e3c6d0-46e5-5655-aafb-6195b69f7e23[6](/tncms-asset)(tncms-asset)a0093276-ba43-5e88-a7f5-46793efd103a[4](/tncms-asset)(tncms-asset)f779d7f2-b1b1-5b29-9720-7b1792da936e[8](/tncms-asset)(tncms-asset)e91fea1c-5748-580e-89ce-b9fd9cd4afca[9](/tncms-asset)(tncms-asset)fe6575d2-c9a8-5e98-a537-7bd0e0388cb9[10](/tncms-asset)(tncms-asset)f2ff5d14-1dae-5376-94de-bb2e33f0391e[11](/tncms-asset)