PORTLAND, Maine -- Life-sized clusters of blue irises cover every wall. Dragons breathe fire in the orange and blue fabric of a settee. Orange, red, and yellow pillows shimmer in an Indian print on a low couch. Antique gilded-frame mirrors hang next to paintings, big and small, of flowers.
That's just in one guest room.
The decor at the Pomegranate Inn might make a minimalist wince; in fact, at first it's all I can do to resist taking at least a few things off the walls just to see how that stunning iris wallpaper might look with less competition for the eye. But the impulse doesn't last long. Soon, I realize that the gregarious design is wonderfully far from the lace-doily ubiquity of Victorian chintz, and I start looking around with a smile.
There's plenty to see inside this handsome Italianate structure in Portland's quiet West End. The lamps alone (a floor sculpture that uses dogwood branches as a base below colorful paper boxes, a little vintage number with a duck for a base, a pair of mint-green Chinese figures sitting atop a chest of drawers) are probably worth an exhibit of their own.
In the common areas, the artwork includes a giant off-white bas-relief American flag, with the circle of 13 stars and waving stripes; a blood-colored print of a massive stern-faced bull; and, on shelves and tables, multiple artist's visions of pomegranates: one white, one brown, and one orange and red, with ruby-like seeds spilling out of the cleaved flesh.
The "bones" of the place don't escape artistic treatment: Mantels get the faux-marble treatment, wood floors become black-and-white checkerboard, and the guest room walls that aren't papered are painted with murals. Because I booked late for the busy Columbus Day weekend, I had to switch rooms, staying one night amid the blue irises and the other in a larger room whose walls were painted in a bold pattern of birds perched in the branches of a flowering tree.
The overall effect of all this mixed-up art is wonderfully dynamic and even surprisingly comfortable, as if I'm visiting the home of some quirky art-collector friends. The feeling extends to the hospitality of the staff, who seem as if they genuinely enjoy talking to guests and helping everybody make the most of a trip to one of New England's most culturally sophisticated small cities.
I didn't meet manager Christopher Monahan, but from my first moments in the eight-guest-room inn, when night hostess-concierge Sarah Chiasson opened the mistakenly locked door with a laugh, I could tell there would be nothing stuffy about this B&B. When I marveled at the decor, she didn't miss a beat: "Every day I see something I hadn't noticed before," she said. When she first got the job, she said, she tried in vain to explain the look to her parents. "I just couldn't do it justice."
The inn's owner, Isabel Smiles, is not only an avid art collector, but also a designer whose quirky but effective eye landed her a spread in the October issue of Better Homes and Gardens. At least judging by the magazine's photos, Smiles's Portland home is a bit more subdued in design than the inn, but even at home she combines the modern with the vintage with the antique.
At the Pomegranate, the unfussy attitude also shows up in delightful breakfasts. Rather than the gut-busting, cloyingly sweet affairs so common to this genre of lodging (please, no more "stuffed" French toast drowning in maple syrup), cook Kim McGowan's morning offerings were hearty but relatively restrained. Each breakfast begins with a juice combination: orange, cranberry, and pomegranate. One day, we had perfectly scrambled eggs topped with cherry tomatoes and corn, alongside paper-thin slices of prosciutto and crisp-tender asparagus spears. The next, it was waffles with poached cranberries and, thank heaven, syrup on the side.
Of course, as is universal in a bed-and-breakfast, there's no menu. Unless you speak up, you get what everybody else gets. That was fine by me, but on my first morning there, as I sat bleary-eyed from a lack of caffeine and in no mood to socialize, a ninth-grade companion at my table was less than thrilled about the meal he saw headed his way.
"Mom," he whispered with a scowl, "I want a bagel with cream cheese."
That didn't happen. Mom and Dad -- Manhattan psychologist and her lawyer husband -- told him to be happy with what he had. The rest of us needed no such instruction.
Joe Yonan can be reached at yonan@globe.com.
