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"For someone who preferred to shun the limelight, Rachel \"Bunny\" Mellon, who died on March 17th at age 103, was a significant, if somewhat mysterious presence in the world of style, rarely quoted yet widely admired.\n\nSublime perfection was her goal, whether it was having the mature oak trees at her 4,000-acre Virginia farm pruned into giant green clouds or ordering maids' uniforms from the couturier Hubert de Givenchy, thereby ensuring that her staff wore clothes as finely crafted as her own wardrobe. The gardens that Mellon, a self-taught but award-winning landscape designer and horticulture scholar, created possess a restful, immaculate elegance, and two of them are American icons: the White House's Rose Garden and the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, where she tucked herbs for the Kennedys' chef amid the flowerbeds.\n\nFollowing in the footsteps of her father-in-law, who founded Washington's National Gallery of Art, she and her late husband, the financier and philanthropist Paul Mellon, assembled a spectacular collection, ranging from medieval drawings to Georgian equestrian scenes to Diego Giacometti bronzes. It was a passion that occasionally proved startlingly extravagant: The couple once purchased 70 wax sculptures by Edgar Degas in one fell swoop, and another time, Mrs. Mellon stopped by Mark Rothko's studio and left with 13 of his works.\n\nThe Mellons' homes, on the other hand, are barely known beyond a circle of friends, the couple having eluded the frequent entreaties of design publications. A wide array of decorators (such as Billy Baldwin, Syrie Maugham, Bruce Budd, Paul Leonard, and John Fowler) and architects (H. Page Cross, Tommy Beach, Edward Larrabee Barnes, and Hugh Newell Jacobsen) worked closely with Bunny Mellon over the years, but the end result was absolutely singular, a highly personal brand of understated elegance that trickled down into the homes of admiring friends\u2014Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis among them\u2014and, thence, quietly, into the public arena.\n\nWood floors painted in muted colors, inspired by Swedish interiors of the 18th century, were a constant in Mellon's rooms, from Antigua to Manhattan to Paris, because, as she once explained, \"I like the way marble floors reflect light, but these are warmer and quieter.\" Plainspoken Proven\u00E7al furniture was deemed appropriate for the Virginia countryside, though suavely mixed with blockbuster modern art and humble-chic tables made by the craftsmen on her farm; dix-huiti\u00E8me antiques were welcomed in the couple's urban settings, the Louis XV and XVI treasures loosened up with refreshingly simple, small-patterned fabrics and the presence of flowering plants nestled in handwoven baskets that she often soaked in water to keep the fibers pliant. Paintings by major artists were propped here and there, on tabletops and sometimes against the backs of chairs, the casualness bringing a sense of intimacy and charm to works that could have been hanging in museums. Mellon is also largely responsible for the enduring popularity of potted topiaries\u2014rosemary, thyme, and the like trained into spheres and set on tabletops like green planets in a miniature solar system. The plants' quiet visual rhythm seemed to underscore their owner's belief that rooms should soothe rather than enliven.\n\n\"Nothing should stand out,\" Bunny Mellon told The New York Times in 1969. \"It all should give the feeling of calm. When you go away, you should remember only the peace.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/in-memoriam-bunny-mellon>