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By Steven Kurutz
July 13, 2021
ESSEX, Mass. — When he was 22 and flush from success as a member of the boy band New Kids on the Block, Jonathan Knight bought a Georgian house, built circa 1900, on the North Shore here, with a slate roof, Palladian windows, terraces and 12,000 square feet to pad around in.
It was 1990, two years after the New Kids released their second studio album, “Hangin’ Tough,” which topped the Billboard charts, spawned several hit singles and went on to sell more than 14 million copies worldwide. Suddenly, the five members — Jonathan, his younger brother Jordan Knight, Joey McIntyre, Donnie Wahlberg and Danny Wood — went from scruffy kids from Boston to fantasy boyfriends for suburban teen girls everywhere.
Mr. Knight invited his large family to move out of the city and come up to live with him in the new place. “And then we went on tour, so it was up to my brothers and sisters and mother to do the shopping,” Mr. Knight said, meaning for furniture. His mother’s taste ran to frilly curtains, floral sofas, busy patterned rugs, all appropriate to the house but not to a young pop star.
The couple bought the farmhouse when it came up for sale last year, selling the circa-1800s house in the nearby town of Ipswich where they’d lived for just one year. “I was like, ‘I have to buy it, I have to,’” said Mr. Knight, stretched out on a sofa in the farmhouse’s high-ceilinged living room on a recent morning. “I didn’t want somebody moving across the street. It just adds to the whole family compound.”
Plus, it’s 260 years old, and as viewers of “Farmhouse Fixer” have discovered, Mr. Knight has a passion for historic houses. He grew up in a Victorian in the Dorchester section of Boston, which his hippie parents bought for something like $25,000 in the ’70s. He referred to it affectionately as “a big, old, cold, drafty holes-in-the-wall house.”
For him, refurbishing houses that have seen better years isn’t a pop star’s hobby. It’s how he made his living, especially in the lean years after the New Kids fell from the pop-culture firmament in the grunge-y ’90s.
On the six-episode series, which debuted in March and was just renewed for a second season, Mr. Knight and his interior designer partner, Kristina Crestin, roam New England, the land of old farmhouses in slow decline. They add open-plan kitchens and central air while keeping the old charm in the house so their current owners won’t call the bulldozers. When they achieve the right balance of historic preservation and modern amenities, Ms. Crestin said, Mr. Knight has been known to cry off camera.
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