Palm Sundays

Leave It to Tom Scheerer—the Decorator’s Decorator— to Imbue an Oceanfront House in Palm Beach With Both a Sense of Place and an Insouciant Charm.

- Jesse Kornbluth

BECKY GOCHMAN FIRST CLIMBED ON A HORSE when she was eight years old and immediately began to beg her parents for one of her own. At 11, exhausted by her nightly tears, they surrendered. As a mother, she spared her own daughters any childhood trauma by lifting them onto horses when they were just 18 months old. As a rider, she’s their role model— she has held the Wellington, Florida, title in the amateur-owner hunter division for riders 36 and over for five years.

Dedicated riders own horses. Becky Gochman owns 20. She keeps them at her farm in Wellington, in a barn so lavishly equipped that other horses dream of living there. But the Wellington riding season lasts only three months, and the farm, designed by Tom Scheerer, wouldn’t work as a year-round residence for a family with school-age children. Palm Beach, just 17 miles away, would do quite nicely.

In Palm Beach, she and her husband, David, took an oceanfront house built in 1925 and, instead of updating it, tore it down. The home next door, though new, looked old, so they hired its architects, Peter Moor and Chris Baker, to build a house that looks as if it belongs in the neighborhood, but on a smaller scale at 4,000 square feet.

And then Scheerer went to work. This was his third project for the Gochmans; before Wellington, he’d transformed a staid Manhattan townhouse into what he describes as a “kooky, off-kilter home out of The Royal Tenenbaums.” Harmony prevailed. “Tom presented me with three different choices, and I tended to choose the one he liked,” Becky recalls.