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Your Home: Relaxed Elegance

Lots of luxe

An interior designer’s boldly feminine home in Hull bubbles with personality.

Pamela Copeman loves to entertain on the 650-square-foot deck overlooking Nantasket Beach.Eric Roth

THREE YEARS AGO, with two grown children and a fresh start prompted by divorce, Pamela Copeman was ready for a new challenge. “My goal was to do something I’ve never done before as far as style,” she remembers. “I wanted a home I designed just for me.”

As an interior designer for 20 years, Copeman had tackled everything from seaside homes to luxury Back Bay condominiums with her modern and often colorful twist. Now she set to work on the new 2,250-square-foot condo she bought for herself overlooking Hull’s Nantasket Beach.

“It had no personality,” she says of the space that had served as a model for the 16-unit building. Within a week, Copeman had eradicated its mint-green paint, dark Mediterranean wooden bar, and contractor-grade lighting fixtures. Adding twin partial walls to the living space, she divided it into two areas, one more formal and one a more casual family room.

The fiery sunset over the water served as inspiration for Copeman’s color scheme, with its dominant colors of poppy and tangerine. “We always went to Nantasket Beach with my kids when we lived in Hingham,” she says. “I watched many of these sunsets. I knew what to play with.”

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A floor plan where kitchen, dining room, and living area open to one another — with the living room also opening onto a 650-square-foot deck that overlooks the beach — means natural light flows easily from space to space. To capture and reflect it, Copeman added glittering chandeliers, champagne-colored frames, and lots of shiny surfaces, like the twin mirrored armoires that reach toward the ceiling in the casual living space.

Even the wallcoverings, from Maya Romanoff, have an effervescent quality. A light-worshiping shell wallpaper in mother-of-pearl lines a wall in the entranceway. In the living room, Beadazzled, a glass-beaded textured paper that Copeman describes as “relaxed glam,” covers the wall behind the baby grand piano. “It looks like glistening sand in the light,” she says.

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In the dining room, an antique banquette framed in wood with a champagne finish and covered in animal-print chenille sits at a glass-topped table. Contemporary metallic-bronze upholstered leather dining chairs add their own sheen. Above them hangs a sparkly showstopper: a 10-arm crystal chandelier handed down from Copeman’s grandmother.

All the rich finishes and assertive colors stand as evidence of Copeman’s design theory that “too much of a good thing is wonderful.” Still, she mixes in plenty of large neutral pieces t bno balance the impact. In the family room, for example, bright poppy accent walls play off taupe rugs and rich hardwoods, while an orange faux-mohair chair sits beside a giant beige couch.

The rosy colors continue in Copeman’s distinctly feminine bedroom, where the bed is upholstered in a bright peony pattern and skirted with a petticoat of magenta and chartreuse plaid. “I never skimp on fabric,” Copeman says, pointing out a side table draped in a pearl embroidered silk, a faux mink draped over a tufted chair, and mountains of pillows trimmed with fringe. A Murano handblown pink and cream milk-glass chandelier casts a glow on the soft-peach ceiling and pale chartreuse walls.

Although light is a recurring theme, illumination everywhere is soft, suggesting that this is a place to relax. “Everything in my home says, ‘Stay, have a dance, share a secret,’ ’’ says Copeman. “It’s filled with reflective surfaces, but it’s also a reflection of me.”

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PRETTY IN PINK

Not one for chaotic clutter, Copeman turned to professional organizer Tina Ghiz from Medway-based Aphrotidy to control her jewelry, clothes, and shoes within the bedroom closet. Using divided wooden pull trays from The Container Store, Ghiz brought order to the madness. A backdrop of sorbet-colored wall and gold fixtures turn the storage space into a playground of shiny baubles and accessories in tantalizing colors. Shoe trays allow Copeman to see all of her heels, flats, and strappy sandals at a glance.

Cheryl Fenton is a writer in Medford. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.