Sean Gardner notices that a visitor is transfixed by the unfocused stare of a crayon drawing of Bob Dylan on the wall of the West End apartment he shares with Rebecca Orchant. “It’s one of my favorite things in the house,” he says.
The couple live in the same one-bedroom, one-bath place with a high-ceilinged living room and a crooked view of the harbor that they rented when they first moved to Provincetown from Brooklyn in 2014. Its walls tell their story — one that traipses giddily through flea markets, vintage stores, and antique malls and boasts countless encounters with the best of what Gardner fondly calls “bad art.”
Gardner runs the sandwich shop Pop+Dutch with Orchant. If she is the primary cook in this household, he is the decorator. He got the Dylan drawing at the Brimfield fair. “I saw it from 150 yards away,” he says of the drawing. “I ran toward it.”
The Brimfield Antique and Flea Markets are held three times a year. Gardner and Orchant usually go in May. “It’s football fields of antiques,” says Gardner. It’s his kind of place: he’s drawn to maximalism. But how to decorate a very small space to a maximalist’s satisfaction without it feeling cluttered? Gardner says that when you can’t sprawl, the key is to decorate vertically.
A coffee table is mostly empty, he points out. An armchair bears a single blanket; the couch is a neutral gray. The kitchen is spotless, with every bottle and jar in its place.
It’s the walls that are a colorful maelstrom of ornamentation. But even those, on inspection, are meticulously arranged; they’re curated chaos. The artwork ascends vertically like interactive wallpaper in some fantastic dream.
“I have friends who joke that I’m a hoarder, but a hoarder doesn’t organize things,” he says. “I can’t live in a space where things aren’t put away.”
His hundreds of records are arranged by genre on a shelf in the living room, their number disguised by their narrow spines: jazz, R&B, hip hop, world music, rock, pop, country, gospel. When it comes to music, Gardner — also known as DJ Potato Salad on WOMR — says he’s “an omnivore.”
One wall is the “texture wall,” says Gardner, with shelves built from driftwood he scavenged from Hatch’s Harbor and textural pieces of art including two dancers painted on shaped copper — he found that one in Sevierville, Tenn., Dolly Parton’s hometown. There’s an egg made of carpeting and a pair of “haunted children” that were originally designed in the ’50s for the walls of children’s nurseries. The children are painted on rough boards. Gardner calls the pieces “folk art twice removed.”
Every framed artwork communicates with the pieces around it. Gardner hangs art in odd numbers: groups of three and five and seven — a trick his mother taught him as a child. Like a three-legged stool, it achieves balance. “I stuck with it,” he says. In the winter, he spends a lot of time straightening frames that go askew from wind and construction rumbles.
Gardner and Orchant have got gadgets and gizmos, whatsits, knickknacks, and thingamabobs galore. A stuffed kangaroo that Orchant named Laurence Fishburne, with a joey in her pouch, lurks in the corner. There are nudes, but they seem more ironic than erotic. A stack of vintage Playboy magazines is available on a shelf over the toilet for casual browsing.
In this apartment, the more you look, the more you see. There are little plastic figurines and pieces of fish bone; joke mugs and candlesticks; seashells and postcards; plastic pigs and wooden birds; a vintage ice-cube tray that makes ice in the shape of naked pin-up girls; a tiny orange string-light bulb from the night that Porch Bar closed and, Gardner says, “we thought it was gone forever.”
The decorative objects are changed out regularly. Sometimes they’ll bring an item to Pop+Dutch to sell. Sometimes they’ll bring home a new piece and need to make room for it. A tip for those who are sentimental: Gardner says when he takes a piece off the wall, he’ll set it aside for a while before he removes it from the house, to soften the transition.
The biggest piece of art in the apartment is an abstract work by Orchant’s mother. Spotlit over the record shelf, it’s a moment of calm, so assured are its rich colors and thick lines. It wouldn’t fit anywhere else, says Gardner. “I like things that have their places.”
When moving into a new place, “I try to hang art within a few days so it feels like I’m living there.” Bare walls are depressing, he says.
But don’t get him wrong — “I’m okay with minimalism,” he says. His own mother has, in her later years, “become very minimalist.” When he was a child, she was more of a maximalist. She kept antiques: Hoosier cabinets, stately glass Planters Peanuts jars, Pyrex bowls. Gardner has incorporated many of those items into his own kitchen.
“She decided, ‘I’m done with that,’ ” he says. “Now it’s very simple tones, empty space, big statement pieces.”
Gardner and Orchant say they’re on the brink of starting a new bar on Commercial Street in the little red building near Whaler’s Wharf. In designing the space, Gardner says, “Our focus is making it a place where you feel calm and welcomed and cozy.” It won’t be obviously maximalist like Pop+Dutch, nor will it be very masculine, like most bars are, with heavy wood and dark metal. This one, which they’re calling “Ladyslipper,” will be “like having a drink at your chic grandma’s house.”
Gardner gazes thoughtfully at the Elvis mask with empty eyes hanging over the fireplace. He found it this winter in Brooklyn. “It’s made by a Venetian mask maker,” he says. “It almost definitely is haunted.” He admits he doesn’t spook easily. “Maybe someday I’ll wear it.”
He and Orchant are currently looking for a taxidermized fox for their collection. They’ve seen a few. “Every time, it’s a little too expensive,” he says. “Or a little too big. This isn’t a big space. Where are you going to put a whole fox?”
