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"View Slideshow\n\nNothing special\u2014just a place to raise kids in,\" is how the wife describes the late-1970s house where she and her husband used to live. She goes on to recount how one day they decided they did want something special\u2014beginning with a bigger property. And how in another part of Long Island\u2014in Brookville, to be exact\u2014they found a patch of land with a good deal of topography to it.\n\nAfter interviewing no fewer than eleven architects, the couple settled on Shope Reno Wharton Associates, a firm known for a judicious use of history and tradition refreshed by modern, open plans. \"The wife wanted the house to have a French flavor\u2014in wood,\" says Bernard Wharton. And she herself quickly fills in, \"I wanted it to be just quietly beautiful in a country way\u2014like, let's say, a woman who's got on a pair of jeans, a cashmere sweater and her very best pearls. Needless to say, it had to be big enough for my grown children to be able to come and stay in with their children, and so on down the line. And aesthetically flexible, because I like to entertain six people and I like to entertain seventy people.\"\n\nThe resulting 7,500-square-foot building meets all those requirements and exceeds them. It is, first of all, completely integral with its setting. \"We came into a lushly wooded site, and we treaded very lightly,\" Wharton's partner, Allan Shope, explains. \"We had respect for the land and were determined to design a distinctive house that was sensitive to its environs\u2014we don't like a house to look like it was dropped out of a helicopter.\" Indeed, they took care to keep the height of the structure down to two stories on the driveway side, knowing that \"with that dropoff topography\" (the land slopes rather dramatically down to a ravine) there would naturally be an additional level at the rear.\n\nThe house is composed of a series of elements that not only exude but induce a feeling of harmony, no matter how singular and fanciful they are. There are steep gabled roofs with large overhangs (the French influence that the wife had suggested) and two scandent turrets. One, ringed at the top with clerestory windows, contains the stairwell and, in Wharton's apt words, \"acts almost as a beacon or punctuation point\"; the other encompasses the kitchen-cum-breakfast-room at the back. These towers, along with the two fieldstone chimneys, add a dash of verticality (which speaks, if abstractly, to the trees on the site) to the otherwise linear, horizontal house.\n\n\"We use horizontal trim a lot in our work, especially in the cornice lines\u2014it makes for a more graceful meeting with the ground,\" Wharton says. \"As we see it, this house mostly just rambles along in a very sort of nonchalant way.\"\n\nFrom inside, you can see right through the double living room out to the extensive terrace. \"The idea was for the house to have a decisively visual axis, to add up to a layering of planes as you moved through it, with the distant view as the terminus,\" Allan Shope observes. The wife, as it happened, had a big hand in the plans. \"I bought myself an architectural ruler, because I'm a down-to-the-inch kind of person,\" she confides. \"Allan said, You're the most tenacious client we've ever had.' What I was, probably, was the most annoying client they ever had\u2014and the most thorough. I had a tremendous concept of what we were doing.\"\n\nWhen the house was still only on paper, the couple put it on hold until they had hired an interior designer. \"Again, we interviewed eleven professionals\u2014eleven was our number both times,\" says the wife. \"With Greg Jordan I had the feeling we'd hit it right. He understood that I didn't want sparse and I didn't want overaccessorized.\"\n\nThe designer sat right down with the wife to work out the detailing, which would include drawing profiles of all the woodwork and trim in the house. \"Every door, every cabinet door, every doorknob,\" he chants, \"every plug, every vanity, every surface, every ceiling; and all the casings, crown moldings, raised panels, recessed panels. . . .\" Not to mention the stone chimney breasts of the fireplaces that hold forth at opposing ends of the living room\u2014and finally even the individual windowpanes. \"Shope Reno Wharton were very generous to let me come in and put my layer on the inside, to accept my . . . ,\" Jordan laughs, \"input. And to understand that I wasn't just bringing fluff to the table. What the clients wanted was the best of them and the best of me.\"\n\nAs the house was being built, Jordan and the wife were meeting weekly for what she calls \"pre-shopping experience.\" Once they did start to shop, they knew not only what the scale of the furniture should be but where every piece would be placed. They were starting from scratch: The clients' previous house had had no antiques; the new one was to boast mostly antiques.\n\nDuring the course of a four-day trip to England, the designer and the wife charged off to the Cotswolds, where they wound up purchasing a good half of the furniture in the house, starting with the eighteenth-century mahogany-and-walnut side table that now enriches the entrance hall. \"It had clean, straightforward lines,\" Jordan says, \"and since the clients were coming from a modern aesthetic, it was just the right bridge for them. After that, they felt comfortable buying furniture that was more expressive in carving and shape.\" As the wife recalls, \"Greg had so many things he wanted to find for us. Yet I never felt any pressure to get what he wanted me to get; it had to be what we both wanted me to get\u2014what we all wanted me to get, my husband included.\"\n\nAt the outset the clients had envisioned the interior of their house as being on the neutral side. \"I don't often get asked to work in that kind of palette, and I was excited,\" Jordan recounts, \"because every single thing has to be great when there's no place for it to hide behind color.\" In short order, however, the wife came to the conclusion that a few more hues wouldn't hurt. \"So she and I decided to go from no color to beige, but then when we were studying the central spiral stair, which has this beautiful wrought iron railing, practically in unison we thought, How uneventful to have a beige runner. She asked me right there for the most beautiful color I knew, and I came up with this really soft, warm sun red, almost a paprika. And we wound up doing that runner with no border, no decoration\u2014it's just a simple cut-pile woven wool.\"\n\nThe color from the stair runner seeped down into the sunken living room, which is fifty by twenty-five with an eighteen-foot barrel ceiling with rough-hewn oak beams (not for nothing does the wife call it the great room). There's a paprika-colored club chair at the casual, family room end of the space, and the caned sofas are both covered in paprika linen velvet. \"The thread that runs true throughout this house is patinated wood, and if you could take wood to red, it would be those sofas\u2014they're the expression, in color, of wood,\" Jordan declares. Paprika makes a final, dashing appearance in the dining room, in the plaid cotton fabric that festoons the walls above the wainscoting and in the linen print that swathes the windows.\n\nAnd then the color stops. In the master suite, which lies behind the back turret on the main floor, the couple got their neutrals. Wheat-and-ivory-checked cotton taffeta draperies hang from a polished-mahogany pole; the same check embellishes both the mahogany headboard and the bed skirt. The walls, for their part, are a tan-and-white woven-vine-patterned cotton, as thick as a quilt and just as soft and tempting, for the stimulus here was texture. Nor is the bedroom a stranger to beautiful old grained wood\u2014witness the eighteenth-century Dutch side table, the French and Portuguese bedside tables, the English wing and side chairs. . . .\n\n\"She asked me right there for the most beautiful color I knew,\" Jordan recounts.\n\nFor Greg Jordan, fulfillment can also be found in the house's very tactility. \"Whatever you touch here is so reassuring,\" he says. \"Your hand wants to linger; there's an almost sensual quality. And it's subtly different on every surface. The oatmeal-glazed painted paneling in the living room is so matte you wonder if it isn't conceivably chalk. And when you touch the entrance hall walls, which are all hand-troweled, sanded and waxed plaster, it's like touching highly polished shoes\u2014or beeswax\u2014or candle wax.\"\n\n\"My house on the inside,\" the wife beams, \"looks like a beautiful English country inn.\"\n\nIn other words, something special."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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