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"View Slideshow\n\nThere are designers who believe that the interior of a house should be calibrated to its location, and there are those, like Mario Buatta, who feel that accomplished decoration trumps setting any time. \"Live the way you want to live\u2014that's my motto,\" Buatta says. \"If English country house is your look, it doesn't matter if you have it in England or in New York or in the tropics. The point is to have it lively, to have it interesting, to have it right.\"\n\nProbably no one working today is as deft at getting the English country house right as this clever, seasoned designer. Buatta can conjure layered and personal interiors 20 minutes away from his command center on Manhattan's Upper East Side just as easily as he can 20 hours away, or even as far away as (imagine!) Manila, where he recently wrapped up a project for a businessman who is a longtime client.\n\nPictures, mirrors, sconces, objets\u2014Buatta corralled them all and brought them into an animated rapport.\n\nThis is a story that begins with that old adage about imitation and flattery. When Buatta first saw his client's house some 25 years ago, he saw it in photographs. The owner, in homage to the designer, had painted his living room a vivid pineapple yellow, the color of Buatta's own New York living room at the time (itself a nod to Nancy Lancaster's famous London drawing room). \"He got the color, he got a blue-and-white screen like mine, and he had gotten some good pieces together, but the room sort of just stopped,\" Buatta explains. \"It appeared,\" he notes dryly, \"that he needed me.\"\n\nWorking at first quite literally from a distance\u2014from pictures and careful measurements\u2014Buatta fleshed out the living room to a point, but only to a point. A few years later he designed the client's pied-\u00E0-terre in Manhattan. More years passed. Finally the client decided to add new rooms onto the house and to give existing ones what he calls a \"thorough face-lift.\" It was time to bring Buatta back, and in a far more participatory way than before.\n\nThe house, which the client built in 1973 in the French country style, had a nice varying rhythm of rooms: the rather large living room, which Buatta had first consulted on long distance; a new, substantial paneled library; the former library, now converted into a handsomely proportioned private study; a tiny dining room; various quirky interstitial spaces; a good master bedroom. \"The house was pretty and livable,\" Buatta recalls. \"It was clearly owned by someone who had traveled and collected and had a good eye\u2014but it was not yet quite designed.\"\n\nDesign, for Buatta, inevitably begins with close attention to a room's elevations. Consider, for instance, how he tackled the entrance hall, a room that had dark walls and a high vaulted ceiling. Buatta had the floor painted in a checkerboard of faux-marbre; then he lined the walls and ceiling with a lively fern-patterned fabric. Although he contends that he was not in any way cueing this house to its tropical setting, he does concede that the entrance hall is meant to feel like an extension of the front porch: \"It's a way of easing you into the rest of the house,\" he explains, \"without making such a sharp break with the lush gardens outside.\"\n\nWhen Buatta first saw his client's house, he saw it in photographs.\n\nThe yellow living room, seen in person, turned out to be quite different from the yellow living room seen from afar. \"It was a large space,\" Buatta says, \"and it was in need of serious cozying up.\" Buatta took the room, which formerly had a single central grouping of furniture, and broke it down into three separate islands of sofas (or banquettes), chairs and tables, all afloat on a large blue-and-white needlepoint rug. He added a tall, dramatic piece, a lacquered secretary, \"because you need to break that horizontal line of furniture whenever you can.\" Pictures, mirrors, sconces, porcelains, wall brackets, cushions, objets\u2014he corralled them all and brought them into an elegantly animated rapport that seems, well, downright Buattian. The room hums and brims, but never brims over.\n\nHow does he do it? \"I'm a genius,\" he declares\u2014of course with an ironic laugh.\n\nAfter the large living room is the intimate, octagonal dining room. Buatta hired a local artist to help transform this diminutive space by using paint in brown and three shades of apple green so that its walls look as though they are paneled. Buatta put together vignettes of botanical plates and asked the artist to connect them with trompe l'oeil ropes and tassels. A large round table, a set of upholstered chairs, a floral carpet, a sound-muffling lined drapery, and, presto\u2014the dining room as jewel, or jewel box, fitted out and snug.\n\nWith the new library, Buatta went to work again on a large space. The pine paneling, which was made in England, was given an oatmeal-hued pickled finish\u2014\"Even I concede that mahogany would feel out of place\"\u2014and set a modestly more Neoclassical tone. Buatta anchored the space with a back-to-back sofa and energized the palette by tugging it both toward the warm (the carpet, the upholstery fabrics) and the cool (a pale blue ceiling). Again there are characteristic layers of furniture, pictures and objects: \"I like my rooms to look undecorated,\" Buatta says, \"though they are decorated to the hilt.\"\n\nIntimate spaces seem to bring out some of Buatta's shrewdest solutions. Beyond the large double-height study, with its striking faux-tortoise walls (which were done by a local self-taught painter), and the master bedroom, with its painted wainscoting and architectural four-poster bed\u2014both classic Buatta\u2014is a draped hallway, which is worth lingering over. Buatta devised its design to handle a space pierced by too many doors and windows. \"I thought of it as a room that could be in Greece,\" he says. \"The fabric unified and simplified the busyness and provided a handsome background for the client's collection of grand tour objects.\" Similarly, a small tented dressing room, suavely striped, takes a pedestrian space and gives it integrity, comfort and dash all at once.\n\nAgain it has to be asked: How does he do it? \"In all candor,\" Buatta replies this time, \"I do not really know.\"\n\nBuatta may not, but his client has an idea: \"I'll tell you about Mario,\" he explains. \"Mario arrives in the Philippines after a long, grueling journey. He has a night's sleep. At 10 in the morning, sharp, he is on the job, and he works 12 hours straight. He gets up on a ladder. He gets down again. He has his nails, his glue, his wire, his hammer. He cycles through the house, going from one room to another. He picks up wherever he leaves off. And at the end, he makes his vision become real.\n\n\"It's all in his eye, and the way his eye is connected to that brain of his. Really, it's altogether amazing.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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