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"View Slideshow\n\nWest Bergholt lies just outside Colchester, about an hour's drive northeast of London. Being close to the sea, the local countryside is crisscrossed with rivers, and the light changes constantly. If the low-lying fields and brooding skies remind you of the landscapes of the great painter John Constable, it would be hardly surprising, since this is in fact the heart of Constable country.\n\nIt also comes as no surprise that well-known portrait painter Richard Stone has chosen to live here. Not only was Stone, like Constable, born in the area, but he has remained closely attached to the particular luminosity of the air. A face lives as much by light as trees do, and Stone constantly strives to achieve the exact, living look of the many sitters who come to him for their portraits.\n\nThe dynamic center of West Bergholt Lodge\u2014the comfortable, Regency-style house where Stone lives with his wife and children\u2014is, logically enough, the small, functional studio where the artist spends most of his day on small sketches or full-scale likenesses of one personality after another.\n\n\"The extraordinary light we get in this part of the world has become essential for my work,\" Stone says, as he bends over his palette, mixing some flake white into a dash of burnt umber.\n\n\"I wasn't much more than a child when I started painting portraits, and I made a point of going to the Royal Academy of Arts in London and showing them to a very famous, old painter who wasn't impressed. Go away and paint me a peach,' he said. I felt very crushed, but I went away and painted lots of peaches and took them back to him. Now that's better,' he told me. If you can paint the way light brings a peach to life, you might be able to paint human beings the way they really look.' Of course, it was a marvelous lesson,\" Stone says, \"and it's been with me ever since.\"\n\nLiving likenesses abound on the walls of his studio (which was originally a scullery), from international statesmen to society figures and opera stars. Over the years Stone has developed a close relationship with the British royal family, many of whose members he has painted. His striking, full-length portrait of Queen Elizabeth hangs in Colchester Town Hall, while a study for it enlivens the first-floor hall of his own house.\n\nWith increasing success and so many prominent figures coming to West Bergholt, Stone and his wife, Rhonda, realized that their house had to take on a new role. \"When we first moved into the house,\" Rhonda Stone explains, \"we were delighted that Richard had enough space to work and that there were plenty of bedrooms for the children and their friends. But we didn't realize that we were going to be entertaining all kinds of important people. So we had to completely rethink the way our new house worked.\" Luckily, Richard Stone had met New York\u2013based designer Adele McGann during a show of his portraits on board the QE2 liner. \"We had plenty of ideas as to what we wanted, but it was only when Adele agreed to take on the job that things began to come into focus,\" says Rhonda Stone.\n\nBuilt in the 1860s, West Bergholt Lodge had already undergone several radical changes, often at the whim of fate, such as when fire gutted the building during World War I. But this time the objective was perfectly coherent. \"Our aim throughout this enjoyable, stimulating project,\" says McGann, \"was to create a dignified atmosphere in which Mr. Stone could exhibit his work and entertain important visitors while retaining the house's less formal, warm, family feel.\" Since they had become firm friends, decorator and residents were able to comment freely on each other's ideas, and this undoubtedly helped them find a solution that worked on both a private and a professional level.\n\n\"Rhonda and I are very visual people,\" Richard Stone adds, \"so we thought we knew pretty much how things would turn out. But Adele came up with all these amazing solutions. We'd had a big old sideboard in a bedroom for years, and Adele said, Let's try it downstairs; let's just try it.' We did, and it looked so much better. As a painter, of course, I reckoned that when it came to color, I knew exactly what I wanted. So I chose a blue that I thought would set off the pictures nicely. And Adele said: Let's try a slightly lighter blue; let's just try it,' and I have to say that with her particular choice the pictures looked even better.\"\n\nMuch of the furniture had been brought from previous residences, including antiques that Rhonda Stone had collected in the United States. More exotic objects come from the family's frequent trips abroad, notably to Africa. Discreetly hung in the elegant reception rooms, Richard Stone's portraits come to life amid the family furniture, artifacts and souvenirs in a way they never could in the best gallery or museum exhibition. There is no doubt that these works are as much at home at West Bergholt Lodge as Richard and Rhonda Stone are, in a house that in more ways than one could be called picture-perfect."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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