James Petersen, an interior designer with clients across the tri-state area, remembers vividly the moment he knew he wanted to be a ship designer. When he was seven, his parents took him aboard the M/S Oslofjord to say bon voyage to his grandparents who sailed from New York to Norway every year.
"I was mesmerized by the ship," Petersen says. "All those tiny rooms - and each one different." When the ship's bell rang and it was time to debark, Petersen refused to leave.
Over the years, his fascination with ocean liners grew. As a teenager, Petersen built a scale model of the Titanic, now mounted on a shelf in his office below a drawing of the ship. A floor plan of the RMS Queen Elizabeth, used as a troop ship during the Second World War before becoming a luxury liner, hangs on the wall.
His hopes of becoming a naval architect were dashed on learning how much math was required. Instead, he headed to Pratt Institute were he majored in fine art and interior design.
The attention to detail that fascinated Petersen in ocean liners is not that different from the detail required to design spectacular rooms. He says his mentor was the late New York-based designer Mark Hampton.
"If we were doing a dining room, Mark would start talking about china, and what to look for," Petersen says. "Or he would talk about what makes a chair comfortable." As Hampton shared his knowledge, Petersen listened and learned.
Petersen, who recently moved out of Manhattan to Connecticut - "I wanted to be able to hear the birds singing" - now runs his own business, creating elegant interiors for clients in New York, Westchester and Fairfield County. His love of ships and the ocean continues unabated. The walls of his home and studio are covered with oil paintings and watercolors of ships and of the sea that he paints in his spare time. "It my hobby - and a passion," he says.
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