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"Barbara King: I&amp;#039;m flabbergasted. You designed and decorated your house \u2014 and you&amp;#039;re self-taught? Jeannette Whitson: I didn&amp;#039;t draw up the architectural plans. But it&amp;#039;s my vision all the way through, executed by a lot of talented craftsmen. I&amp;#039;m sure I broke all the rules, but the good thing is, I don&amp;#039;t know it&amp;#039;s incorrect. It&amp;#039;s more an emotional, organic way of putting a house together. Somebody once asked me what style it is, and I said, &amp;#039;Think: an Englishman who&amp;#039;s come to America, married a Pennsylvania Dutch woman, and has a French mistress on the side in Charleston.&amp;#039; I&amp;#039;m not thinking house, I&amp;#039;m thinking epic Southern romance novel. It&amp;#039;s just a fanciful description of all the different influences here. The architecture blends English stone farmhouse with the patina of an old church wall in Paris and a Pennsylvania Dutch barn. I wanted it to look as if it were the original home on the site. The kitchen is a mash-up of English scullery and French bakery. The entry is Charleston-style, where you first walk through a street door \u2014 essentially you&amp;#039;re still outside \u2014 and then through the actual front doors. Throw into the mix Belgian grays and American Impressionism. All the windowpanes are restoration glass, which has a waviness reminiscent of blown glass, and it made the light a major design element. The windows refract and disperse light in a painterly way that reminds me of the Impressionist works my father collected. I suppose I was subconsciously influenced by the style. It seems to be the benchmark for the soft, moody tone of the interior. Which explains why there are so few window treatments in the house. Exactly. The light is moving and changing all day long. Right now, for instance, there&amp;#039;s a rosy glow suffusing all the rooms facing the back terrace. Only the rooms facing the street have curtains or shades: Views are part of the decoration. And the decoration is part of the view. There have been such advances in outdoor furniture and fabrics that you can now decorate the outside with the same degree of detail and comfort as you do the inside. You can treat your immediate surroundings as livable space \u2014 our outdoor living room is where you&amp;#039;ll find my family most of the time. It was important to me that the house and gardens be interconnected, that the inside meld with the outside. The house wraps in a U shape and embraces our back terrace. A whole wall of French doors in the living room opens onto that terrace, so it all becomes one space, a vanishing threshold. Gardens play a big role in your life. I bring the garden, and nature-related elements, into everything I do. It&amp;#039;s the basic tenet of my company, Garden Variety Design. I buy antique furniture and ornaments, mostly from France and Belgium, but also some pieces from rural England, such as saddle-stone and trough sinks. For the house, I made sure each entry door is through a garden. In front is my secret garden \u2014 that&amp;#039;s another Charleston inspiration \u2014 enclosed by a wall of pear trees. The pear trees almost look like outdoor sculptures.  The trunks and branches were espaliered into a perfect trellis form by a man I call &amp;#039;the Tree Whisperer.&amp;#039; I love passing through that little space, but the side kitchen door is the one we use the most. You enter it through a vegetable garden. And why wouldn&amp;#039;t you want to use that door? Your kitchen is so welcoming. It marries well with the rest of the house. I don&amp;#039;t have any upper cabinets on the range wall because it&amp;#039;s visible from the entertaining areas, and I wanted it to blend seamlessly with the more formal spaces. Instead I use old French brass-and-glass standing bakery shelves. All the counters are Calacatta marble. The table in the breakfast area is an antique marble pastry table I found in the south of France. That 100-year-old marble reminds me that nicks, cuts, stains, and mishaps all come together to create the most beautiful patina, so don&amp;#039;t sweat the small stuff. In time, my counters will end up looking like that table. Did you have to make compromises anywhere? You have to when you build a house. I wanted antique wide-plank floors, but that was unrealistic for a house this size \u2014 I needed 3,000 square feet of material. I got an end run of commercial wide-plank white oak for $3 a square foot and had someone hand-brush it with a deep stain \u2014 a combination of coffee and ebony. That&amp;#039;s the closest I could get to old plank flooring. Is your house everything you hoped it would be? Our family has never lived anywhere for more than four years. We&amp;#039;ve been in this house almost two years now, and I think everyone is lying in wait to see where we go next. But this is our forever house: It&amp;#039;s warm, it&amp;#039;s comfortable, and it has soul. We will never part with it. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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