Joan Datesman was on a mission. Having renovated a few dozen homes in her time, she was in search of her next quarry. In a quiet neighborhood just minutes from downtown, the pottery expert found a quaint but unassuming little house. But there was a spark of something there, beyond the cedar shake siding and sandstone exterior. She made up her mind to buy it on the spot.

The four-story home had been built around 1930, one of about ten in the neighborhood put up by the Miller brothers, a carpenter and a stonemason. Datesman found that the cut-up, dark interior didn’t work for her lifestyle. So, with architect Jay Swartz and builder John Pilli, she began gutting the interior and brought in decorators, carpenters, and a lot of imagination. “Joan usually has a vision of what she’s thinking about, and all I do is take it, massage it, and help it around,” explains Swartz.

As a top dealer of Quimper pottery (pronounced camp-air), which originated in the Brittany region of France, Datesman has yearly spent at least six weeks in France for the last quarter-century. Yet even she was pleasantly surprised to see her plans emerge into what could be a country home in Brittany, just a few blocks from the Navy-Marine Corps Stadium. “I was amazed that I’d turned this Annapolis house into the closest thing you can find to a French millhouse,” says Datesman, who, six months after she started tearing down walls, in the spring of 2004, moved in. “The rooms are quite small,” Datesman explains. “But I opened up all the doorways so that the rooms all flow into each other. It’s almost as if the whole ground floor is one large room that’s just been walled off to hold some necessary pieces of furniture.”

Visitors who enter Datesman’s front door find themselves in a sunroom, which affords a view of the dining room, kitchen, and living room. Accustomed to eleven-foot ceilings from her last home (a rehab on Maryland Avenue), Datesman decided that her mission for the living room was to add light by cutting a hole in the ceiling. A series of 200-year-old wooden beams, rescued from a Pennsylvania barn, line the ceiling and suggest a cozy refuge in the French countryside. Two linen loveseats flank an antique French work table, stacked with books on art and antiques. Datesman added a staircase that leads from the living room to an open gallery, which she transformed into a library. The three sides, open to the space below, are lined with bookcases that showcase her collection of folk art and other antique collectibles. And in the first-floor bedroom, one wall is lined by a closet fashioned from shutters from another Pennsylvania farmhouse. “I built the wall to fit the shutters,” she admits.

If Datesman has a singular talent she brings to every rehab project, it’s a gift for color. Quimper has such intricate design and rich colors, and she planned the interior décor to perfectly complement and showcase her collection of vases, plates, figures and more. The living room is covered with a cream and taupe wallpaper, while the space’s two-story back wall is covered with tick-stripped cantaloupe-and-watermelon Scalamandre wallpaper. The dining room has neutral off-white walls, but the patterns of the dining room chairs—red, orange, and white—add a jolt of color. But the kitchen is the real show stopper. The walls are covered with purple-checked wallpaper, which also covers the refrigerator, while the eggplant Aga stove commands attention. “Isn’t that fun?” asks Datesman, delighted all over again with her bold choice.

Datesman finds parallels in being a collector and a restorer of beautiful homes. Both involve a passion for beauty and perfection and an almost obsessive desire.

“You have this thing in your head, and you start to pull it all together, and you just can’t stop,” she says. “There will always be something you want.”

Yet Datesman insists that, at age seventy-eight, she’s found her permanent home—not so big that when she’s alone she feels like she’s rattling around, and just big enough for the festive dinner parties. “This house satisfies all my needs. And besides,” she says, with a boisterous laugh, “I’m too old to move!”

Rosemary Harty writes from Annapolis.