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"View Slideshow\n\nWhen I begin with a new client, I always...\n\nBehave! I always say, \"I am going to control myself,\" but then I give up. The best relationships and projects occur when I don't control myself, when I don't only focus on pleasing the client but on expressing myself.\n\nThe mistake most people make when doing their own designing is...\n\nDoing it themselves! Since the clients are comfortable with what they know, eventually they're just reciting the same thing. They can't produce the unexpected because the ideas are coming from them.\n\nThe most unusual request from a client was...\n\nLooking at fabrics at 38,000 feet. I was doing an airplane and looking at fabrics with the clients, and I said to them, \"Remember, you'll be flying in the clouds, and the light will be brighter.\" So they said, \"Let's go flying.\" So we flew for three hours over New York just to look at the fabrics.\n\nFor someone who wants a big look on a small budget today...\n\nColor is one thing that is unpretentious, and it doesn't have a price. With a good painter, you can create a beautiful wainscot or a Russian floor. If you want a big look, the main component is color.\n\nOne of the best things right now to collect for an investment is...\n\nExtraordinary French furniture. Though the number of pieces available is very limited, and they are becoming more rare, you can still find them. These are pieces you can neither reproduce nor reinvent.\n\nIn the area of home electronics, people are asking for...\n\nHidden theaters\u2014suddenly your powder room converts to an IMAX! I prefer to chat with the experts and to educate myself about the technology, because when you bring experts into the project, they want to put in speakers bigger than the doors or furnish the room with only one chair because the sound is better. They don't always see the bigger picture.\n\nIn the next ten years the most important thing in design will be...\n\nMy progress in my career goes along with my desire for more knowledge. The more you study, the less you know; and then you start editing, and the nicer the space becomes. I wish people would edit and keep the best in design\u2014not just in antiques but in everything.\n\nMy biggest design mistake was...\n\nI have many! I think that sometimes our mistakes make our projects very much alive and give them a certain character. Otherwise, they would be too perfect. Once I went very quickly to see an apartment in a recently finished building, rushing in and rushing out. I met with the client and started tearing out walls. When the client came to visit the apartment four months later, she asked me, \"Why are you doing this here? This is not my apartment.\" I didn't believe her at first. But then I said, \"You have two options: You can buy this apartment, or you can fire me.\" She bought the apartment and is there to this day.\n\nMy favorite room to design is...\n\nAll of them, but I prefer the entrance hall. If a house is like a book, the entrance hall is like the synopsis; it tells you about who lives there and what they're like and a bit about what you're going to see once you cross the threshold. Many people don't think that way and don't do entrance halls. The most beautiful console tables, center tables and great paintings go in the entrance hall. And clients who don't have much money can just do the hall and close the door to the rest of the house!\n\nI change my own interiors...\n\nVery often. If our creativity is an accumulation of the things we are learning, I like to experiment with them. I like so many things, and I like making changes in my homes. What is a drama for most people is my joy; what is stressful to others or something they postpone, I look forward to.\n\nThere are many rules designers should bear in mind. One is...\n\nThat the client is going to live in the house and the designer is not. I hate when people go into a house and say, \"Oh, this is a so-and-so,\" and the client says, \"No, this is mine.\" Of course, when you decorate a house, you have a hand in it, and people might recognize the work, but I love when they think it is so extraordinary that there's no way I could have done it!\n\nThe order I follow when I design is...\n\nI consult on floor plans and look at the circulation. I start thinking about how this family or this person is going to use the house. I do this in drawings, and then I create an ideal layout. Then we start specifying the look we want\u2014maybe a light and airy house at the beach with rattan, or something with Italian gilt furniture or a place in the mountains. The placement, the location, is crucial. Then we look at colors and then the textures.\n\nEvery home must have...\n\nA dining room. Not having a dining room is like not having a garage. I love having drinks in one room, and then you move into a room with a certain magic to eat. There's nothing more wonderful than a beautifully set table\u2014there are flowers, and the china and the crystal are beautiful. It doesn't matter if the food is burned; the ambience makes the taste. I have an aversion to monotony. In my daily life I like to go to one room to do something and then move to another to do something else.\n\nDesign likes and dislikes...\n\nLikes: Someone recently described me as an \"eccentric Neoclassical person,\" and while I think of myself as someone with very simple taste, really I'm lying. Out of all the most extraordinary things, I keep the most pure, the pieces with wonderful design, the pieces with a pedigree.\n\nDislikes: When people appropriate things badly, when they use things without respect for proportion and harmony, when people have a lack of respect for the architecture or the piece.\n\nMy personal dream house would be...\n\nPerhaps a very eccentric Neoclassical building! It would be a house with a lot of history; a house that is very large, because I feel very comfortable in big spaces; a house that would be telling me things all the time. Visually, houses like this are like a feast of color, forms and rhythms. It's why I mix so many things from different periods\u2014it's like a great conversation. It makes things vibrate, it makes them energetic, and things start happening.\n\nWho or what has influenced my style...\n\nThere have been many things and many extraordinary people. I've been attracted to 18th-century architects like Gabriel and Ledoux as well as to 19th- and 20th-century architects. They're all so different. I don't compare. Say a Richard Meier and a Gabriel both produce masterpieces\u2014I simply appreciate the differences.\n\nThree essentials for entertaining are...\n\nA good guest list, a good place to entertain and the unexpected.\n\nIf I could live anywhere (other than where i am), it would be...\n\nI live in Paris and New York. When I'm in Paris, I want to be in New York, and when I'm in New York, I want to be in Paris. I miss the people, my dogs, the character of the city."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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