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"View Slideshow\n\nUse it or lose it\" is a commandment that usually applies to muscle tone, brain power, sex appeal or rent-controlled apartments. It rarely, if ever, describes the challenge of redefining a sumptuous Palladian guesthouse on a vast estate in the Midwest. The mogul and philanthropist who owns the property was never, it should be noted, in the slightest danger of missing a mortgage payment. \"But the pavilion had lost its raison d'\u00EAtre,\" says John Stefanidis, the eminent London-based designer who has worked with the owners on five houses in America and abroad. \"My clients had no scarcity of other places to entertain, and they felt that if we didn't bring this one up to the gold standard of the main house\u2014inside and out\u2014there was no point in keeping it.\"\n\nA team of decorative painters \"stormed the dining room,\" treating the walls to a \"faux-pebble effect\" that mimics a Fortuny print.\n\nThe pavilion's original design, by Thierry W. Despont, pays homage to two masterpieces of residential architecture: Andrea Palladio's Villa Rotonda, a jewel of the Renaissance, and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, a jewel of the Enlightenment. Despont modified the domed roof of his models with a cluster of columnar chimneys that flank the cupola\u2014a detail inspired by an early-18th-century Virginia manor, Stratford Hall, in Westmoreland County. The effect is of a rectangular steeple that sobers the profile of the exterior in keeping with the simplicity of its views: a park of woods, rolling lawns, and pastures with barn fencing laid out by the English landscape architect Elizabeth Banks, who collaborated with Stefanidis and architect Tony Barton, of the British firm Donald Insall Associates, on the pavilion's renovation. Barton skirted the steps leading to the porticoes with brick plinths to create a more generous outdoor reception space for the public rooms on the first floor, adding a balustrade of Chinese Chippendale fretwork and a new entablature, columns and Ionic capitals.\n\nFrom the outside, the pavilion could pass for a solidly American bank or church. Thrift and piety, however, are not hallmarks of the interiors. Stefanidis is a native of Alexandria, Egypt, which is to say, the quintessential cosmopolite. He is a master of the English country house style, but then the English country house is a category that includes palaces like Chatsworth, mansions by Adam and neo- Gothic piles filled with the booty of their lords' grand tours. He is also famous for his sensuous use of color and of exotic seasoning\u2014elements of Asian, Mediterranean, Caribbean and Indian design that relax the formality of palatial rooms. An international clientele of palace dwellers is devoted to him, in part because the ultimate luxuries for a jaded palate are freshness and surprise.\n\nThe guesthouse delivers its surprises like a deft romantic comedy.\n\nThe guesthouse delivers its surprises like a deft romantic comedy: There's a delicious complication behind every door. \"We decided to have fun,\" Stefanidis says, \"and to treat the pavilion like the folly of an 18th-century estate\u2014an eye-catcher in the park and an alluring destination where a weekend party might lunch or dine. As no one resides there officially, we could indulge in colors and finishes that were too fanciful or intense for daily life. I wouldn't want to sleep in the Shanghai bedroom every night\"\u2014an enchanting bower in a moonlight palette where butterflies embellish the Chinese wallcovering and the baldachin is hung with peacock silk\u2014\"but one would dream memorably there.\"\n\nMost of the pavilion's 14 rooms radiate from the central rotunda on two floors. They are grand yet not precious or solemn\u2014though they might have been. The owners have a major collection of art and antiques, but \"we decided,\" says Stefanidis, \"that important pictures and Boulle commodes weren't suitable, as one didn't want the guesthouse to become a museum.\" Stefanidis mixed period light fixtures and furniture of his own design with choice antiques and lavish fabrics. \"There's a sense of humor to the opulence and trompe l'oeil that makes them feel modern,\" he says, \"while relating the pavilion to 'scherzos' like Giulio Romano's Palazzo del Te and Palladio's Teatro Olimpico.\" Throughout the house, the tartness of British wit cuts the richness of Italian artifice. Each of the whimsically named bedrooms has a different flavor, and guests must be as hard-pressed to choose among them as a child contemplating a glistening array of gelati. Besides the Shanghai, there is the Foxcote (a symphony in blue and white) and the Fox and Hound, where Chinese porcelains consort with Regency armchairs, an English mirror and stool, an antique kilim, a mahogany four-poster with hangings of scarlet silk and an Empirestyle wallcovering that depicts in one panel a riding scene and in others, courtiers disporting in a pastoral landscape. The equestrian theme recurs in the frescoes of the entrance hall, whose models were recruited from the owners' stables.\n\nThe public rooms were designed not only for entertaining but as entertainment. \"Their theatrical glamour,\" Stefanidis declares impiously, \"flirts with bad taste, which gives them an edge that I love.\" (An edge honed on the whetstone of virtuosity\u2014amateurs should not attempt the same tricks at home.) He used six woods, including ebony and bubinga, for the inlays of the rotunda floor and lavished the Neoclassical bookcases with gilt. A handsome suite of William Kent side chairs seems ready for masked and powdered ballgoers to perch upon. By fire and candlelight, the paneled library glows like a black opal. The living room windows are voluptuously swagged, and mirrors reflect the dazzle of gilt and crystal. A team of decorative painters who follow Stefanidis around the globe \"stormed the dining room,\" he says, treating the walls to an elaborate \"faux-pebble effect\" that mimics a Fortuny print and marbleizing every inch of the woodwork that isn't mirrored. Here he paired a fine George III mahogany table with a set of reproduction dining chairs in parcel gilt. \"Good copies can have great charm and presence,\" he says. \"The bas-reliefs on the stair landing obviously aren't the Elgin Marbles, but they are beautiful Victorian castings of them. One can, one often has to, and one sometimes should, mix new things with old.\"\n\nThe tartness of British wit cuts the richness of Italian artifice.\n\nThere are heartland purists who will surely consider the pavilion an alien amid their corn. Appropriateness, however, is a notion that promotes order but stifles \u00E9lan. There are also those who understand that life is dull without a touch of poetic excess or a folly to which one can escape one's routine. \"Le superf lu,\" sighed Voltaire, \"chose si n\u00E9cessaire!\" He might have been thinking of the pavilion. Its architecture obeys the golden mean, but its exuberance defies the laws of just proportion. And its best raison d'\u00EAtre is that it needs none."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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