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"View Slideshow\n\nAlexa Hampton talks the way she decorates, with a kind of candid, sunny affability that eschews the baroque and the overwrought at every turn. Just listen to her on the subject of a house in Bridgehampton, New York, that she recently completed for a young family that had been seeking the proverbial \"calm, easygoing but stylish\" weekend retreat.\n\n\"My clients bought a spec house that had been appointed for sale with taffeta curtains and crystal-beaded chandeliers twinkling over the bed\u2014someone's erroneous idea of what would be attractive to an urban couple,\" she says with a laugh. \"They had to look beyond those things to see, as we all did, that as far as spec houses go, this one had some good moments. Beneath the glitter there was hope.\"\n\nWhat constitutes \"good moments\" for Alexa Hampton? A floor plan with a nice sense of proportion and flow, paneled wainscoting in the dining room, dark floors, a well-scaled double-height entrance hall with a handsome staircase, beautiful views, good light and a prevailing sense of graciousness throughout.\n\n\"Now, don't get me wrong,\" she says. \"There were some lamentable details too. The mantelpieces were out of whack scale-wise. There was a strange trapezoidal niche in the master bedroom, the sort of place where you would stash figurines\u2014if you had them. The living room needed some punctuation, and to be honest, I am not a great fan of a kitchen that opens onto the living room, as this one does.\"\n\nNaturally, Hampton began by editing and adjusting these conditions. She took out the mantelpieces and installed new ones that were in more respectful scale. She covered over the offending niche and pulled back on some overly fussy molding details in the kitchen. She designed a pair of bookcases for the living room, but as for the organizational issues, all she could do there was arrange the furniture so that the living room sofa would turn its back on the kitchen. \"Sometimes you have to ask the decoration to give a nudge to the architecture,\" Hampton says. \"Not every house can be 100 percent there.\"\n\nThis is not Hampton settling so much as Hampton being realistic. The same goes for the way she approaches her interiors: \"I am not one of those people who are desperate to be original for originality's sake,\" she says. \"But I do like every elevation to be composed, every room to have some kind of intention.\"\n\nSo when her clients asked for a house that was, as the wife puts it, \"peaceful, beautiful and largely drained of color, a place where we and our two small children could feel at home summer and winter,\" the designer complied\u2014but in her own rigorous way. Take a look at the entrance hall, for instance: Faced with an interior whose severe rectilinearity needed \"to be tamed,\" she played with a series of echoing geometrical shapes: diamonds on the chandelier, circles on the console and a grid on the carpet. \"All these different shapes give the room extra layers,\" she explains. \"The results should feel effortless, when in fact they were anything but.\"\n\nIn order to keep the rooms awake and dynamic, she played with a contrast of lights and darks and introduced at least one note of color, usually blue, into each space. In the entrance hall, the floor and the furniture supply the darks, the upholstery a flash of color. In the living room, color comes from the books, the art and a Swedish tall case clock. In the dining room the wainscoting left room for an embroidered linen wallcovering, and she snuck a thin blue stripe into the sheer curtains and a cluster of blue-and-white Chinese jars under a sideboard: \"I just couldn't resist the color, the pattern and that bit of shine,\" Hampton says.\n\nUpstairs in the bedrooms, which have white walls, ceilings and carpeting, the designer had to work harder to weave in those contrapuntal notes. \"The only way to handle these vast white bedrooms,\" she says, \"is to delineate furniture groups, make sure there are dark mahogany legs on the upholstered furniture and to pay attention to details like studs, hardware and small tables with funky silhouettes.\"\n\nIn houses like these, she adds, \"you have to think everything down to the last detail. Sometimes it's the witty curve on a chair leg that brings it all to life.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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