For The Perfect Couple, Decorating the Perfect Nantucket Home

If there’s one thing we can count on, it’s that a murder mystery mini-series starring Nicole Kidman will feature a gorgeous home. In The Perfect Couple, Kidman’s latest Netflix thriller based on novelist Elin Hilderbrand’s 2018 book of the same name, that dwelling is Summerland, a fictitious multi-generational retreat on Nantucket where the Winbury family have converged for a wedding only to have a body wash up on their shoreline the night before the nuptials.

Although the beachfront private estate used for filming is actually on Cape Cod, reportedly in Chatham’s Eastward Point neighborhood along Pleasant Bay, set decorator Claire Kaufman’s decoration of the home is the epitome of Nantucket chic. The gray cedar shingles, crisp white Adirondack chairs, bamboo roll-up window shades, and blue hydrangea bushes all communicate the family’s Nantucket sensibility, but it goes beyond that: Kaufman also selected furniture and objets d’art representative of each character’s persona.

Along with production designer Sarah Knowles, director Susanne Bier, and costume designer Signe Sejlund, Kaufman devised a color palette for each character. “We love that vibrant red for Liev Schreiber’s character, Tag, and that soft rose palette for Kidman’s character, Greer. A lot of this was accomplished through the wallpapers.”

Of the two, Tag is edgier, more assertive, and so the red makes sense, as does Kaufman’s choice to dress his wood-paneled office with a shadowbox of antique guns along with intriguing book titles like Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson by Nigel Nicolson, about Virginia Woolf’s female lover. His novelist wife Greer’s femininity and formal nature is shown in her office, with rose-hued walls, a vase of pink flowers and a white desk–along with her book covers framed and hung on the walls.

Kaufman wanted Summerland’s rooms to feel “lived in,” despite the fact that it is a vacation home for Tag, Greer, and their grown children, Thomas (Jack Reynor) and Benji (Billy Towle). “In Thomas and Benji’s bedrooms, I tried to have things that might have been left over from their childhoods,” says Kaufman. “In Thomas’s room, there’s a glass jar full of old baseballs. Another relic in Thomas’s room is a “Don’t Give Up the Ship” square cloth banner, a reference to what a Navy captain famously said in 1813. This is paired with wallpaper featuring trees, in blue, gray, and ivory hues, and a gold-post bed frame.

“It was really important to get across that this house was multi-generational, and well-curated,” she says. “Summerland almost feels like a character within the story, and I wanted a great mix of antiques, but also a good amount of contemporary art to offset that and ground it. I never wanted it to feel fussy or ‘old lady,’ but more of a place the family could be together and unwind.”

Her goal to employ “pattern on pattern” is truest in the guest rooms, where different—but all equally vibrant—wallpapers are hung. For example, a leafy-green motif in Benji’s room (where his fiancé, Amelia, played by Eve Hewson, also sleeps) is paired with a Pendleton-like striped wool blanket; free-standing oval mirror; dark-wood armoire (with a wicker jug on top) and an antique coat rack. Nearly all of the guestrooms bedding was sourced from Matouk.

The cottages, where the family puts visiting guests, were one of Kaufman’s favorite areas to design, with interior ship-lap walls. “I wanted (the cottages) to feel like they were sort of this catch-all, things that might have been left over from other guests or beach reads shoved on the bookcase, seashells that were just collected, knickknacks on those big built-in shelves,” she says.

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Of all of Kaufman’s projects, which include the 2023 film Oppenheimer, for which she received an Academy Award nomination, this one was a favorite. “It was an amazing house to decorate and completely in my wheelhouse,” she says. “I love doing big interiors like that. I try to give each room a character, whether through color or style.”