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"View Slideshow\n\nThis house cost me 214 club dates,\" laughs comedienne Joan Rivers. \"That's why I went to Detroit instead of Liza's wedding\u2014to pay for the living room windows and walls. Everything here is a club date.\"\n\nRivers is tucked into the corner of one of a pair of canary-yellow sofas centered in the living room of The House That Laughs Built. It is exactly the Connecticut country house she always wanted \u2014the one that wasn't there when she happened upon the property two years ago.\n\n\"This was the ugliest house I'd ever seen. It looked like a Denny's,\" she says, describing the low, flat, midcentury building, designed, she says, \"by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright's who didn't study hard enough.\"\n\nNevertheless, she snapped it up, then called her friend retail executive Joe Cicio, whose interior work, despite his flair as a creative merchandiser, had never included residential design\u2014until, that is, the day Rivers showed up for lunch at his house and fell in love with what she saw. \"Joan called and said, I just bought the most hideous house on the most beautiful property in Connecticut, and you have to do it for me,' \" recalls Cicio. \"I said, Joan, I don't do houses\u2014for anybody. But I'll take a look and tell you what I think.' That was the kiss of death.\"\n\nFollowing a 15-minute perusal of Rivers's new digs, Cicio says, he \"saw it all: an entrance opening into a library, bookshelves, Joan's bedroom with the fireplace, French doors. When I told Joan, she said, Do whatever you want.' The great thing about Joan is that once you show her, she gets it in an instant.\"\n\n\"I told Joe I didn't want a traditional house like I have in New York,\" says Rivers, who is also CEO of Joan Rivers Worldwide. \"I wanted big ceilings, lots of light, but small and cozy, a home where grand would not apply, where my dogs could jump up on the sofa and have a life.\"\n\nShe pauses. \"This is all Joe's vision. In the beginning he said, Trust me,' and I'd go, Yeah, yeah.' But ultimately, he has such an eye that I did. It may not have started out to my taste, but by the end it was. The final result is . . . Joan out of Joe.\"\n\nTheir first mission was to bid adieu to Frank Lloyd Wright with the help of architect Michael Boe, of Boe Studio. And when the wrecking ball was quelled, all that remained of the structure was its footprint, stone columns surrounding the perimeter and the huge stone fireplace in the living room\u2014\"the reason I bought the house,\" explains Rivers.\n\nToday, it has been supplanted by a country house dreamy enough to make Mr. Blandings swoon. The once unimpressively squat structure is now a 5,000-square-foot house featuring 22-foot-high ceilings, 100-year-old chestnut beams, four wood-burning fireplaces, skylights and a massive country kitchen. The living room, spacious enough to hold twin 10-foot-long custom-made sofas, is a festival of light, thanks to nine French doors, six of which open onto the free-form stone terrace that hugs the back of the house and abuts a lush expanse of lawn leading to the pool and poolhouse.\n\n\"Initially, the grounds were to be rustic,\" says Rivers. \"I said, This is a farm.' But then I realized I wanted an English country landscape, like at Blenheim, where you see all that green with only pockets of flowers. And I love my trees. I have one 175-year-old tree that looks better than the men I date.\"\n\n\"A home should reflect the personality of the owner, not the decorator,\" muses Cicio, \"and, God knows, Joan has enough personality.\"\n\nIndeed. And its facets are well reflected in the atmosphere: witty yet elegant, charming but quirky, uniquely warm and personal. \"I look around and see memories: my mother's piecrust table, her good dishes,' reminding me of Thanksgivings and the lovely dinners she gave,\" says Rivers, a tear welling up in her eye. \"And there's the living room table belonging to my aunt, who ran a salon in New York where people like Sol Hurok and Stuart Davis showed up. All these personal things, stored in barrels for years, are now out and appreciated.\n\n\"It's also about finding things,\" she adds. \"When I play a town, I ask to see the art museum and the antiques section. Over the years you pick up a lot of great artworks\u2014and ideas.\"\n\nLike the day in France when the entertainer walked into Monet's house in Giverny and knew she'd found the kitchen of her dreams. \"I was so taken with the blue-and-white tiles, I said, Someday I'm going to have a yellow, blue and white kitchen.' And the palm trees in my bedroom came from a visit to the pavilion in Brighton, England.\"\n\nPalm trees in Connecticut? Well, why not? thought her decorator when Rivers broached the idea. \"Unlike most people, Joan understands folly,\" says Cicio, who happened to have a pair of six-foot bronze palms, once owned by socialite Mona Williams Bismarck. \"Joan loved them, so I said, Let's copy them, paint them white and stick them on either side of your bedroom fireplace.' \"\n\n\"I love, love, love my bedroom,\" exults Rivers of the thoroughly feminine, pink-and-white boudoir that includes a hand-painted secretary inscribed with \"J. R.\" and designed by Thomas Messel, nephew of England's theatrical designer and artist Oliver Messel.\n\n\"This is the bedroom every little girl wants,\" says Rivers, \"out-and-out fantasy. I'm so cozy up in my four-poster bed, the fire going, the dogs lying next to me\u2014and my rubber sailor,\" she laughs. \"We have the best time.\"\n\nRivers's guests are equally well cosseted in their choice of three bedrooms, two of which come complete with sitting rooms and fireplaces, not to mention Carrara marble baths and the womblike luxury of upholstered walls. \"People told me country houses don't have padded walls,\" says Rivers, \"and I said, I don't care.' What I love is that there are no rules here.\"\n\nIn fact, it is this juxtaposition of the refined with the merry, the traditional with the fanciful, that turns a good home into something great. Take, for instance, the pair of blackamoors, plucked from Barbra Streisand's house in Hello, Dolly!, that flank the tub in the master bath, or what Rivers calls \"my own Hall of Mirrors,\" featuring antique mirrors as well as tromp l'oeil tableaux depicting the homes of her friends, including that of pal Prince Charles.\n\n\"If I can't live near the people I love, I can at least see their houses,\" Rivers says. She then points to a painted windowsill where a likeness of Spike, her famous and recently departed terrier, perches. \"Spike always loved the sun,\" muses his owner, \"and now he gets it all day long.\"\n\nRivers and Cicio claim that their only disagreement involved not the interior but the exterior: Where Cicio saw terrace and stone walls\u2014to bring the indoors out\u2014Rivers wanted grass running up to the windows. \"I said, But Joan, this isn't a golf course,' \" says Cicio. Ultimately, Cicio triumphed, much to Rivers's eternal appreciation, she says as she saunters across the meandering terrace, past walls built with stones culled from her property.\n\nIn the end, says Joan Rivers, she got exactly what she wanted: a \"noncompetitive\" country home. \"This house is only about family and close friends, sitting around the kitchen table with the fire going, the wine flowing\u2014a place we can be together.\n\n\"Nobody here has to be on,' \" she continues. \"If someone doesn't come out of his room all weekend, I don't care. I'm not coming here to have dinner guests on Friday and go to their house for cocktails on Saturday. I'm happy I don't know anyone in the area. When I come, I bring my own people. I'm a movable feast.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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