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"View Slideshow\n\nShe may be petite, but she is a powerhouse. Penny Drue Baird, the New York interior designer, is focused, clever and decisive. She gives the impression of running Dessins, her thriving design business, almost effortlessly, while simultaneously managing a family and three houses on two continents.\n\nShe does not seem impetuous, but a couple of years ago she suddenly decided to realize a longtime dream to live in Paris for a year with her husband and three children.\n\n\"After spending several summers in a house in the south of France, I really wanted to spend the school year in Paris,\" she recalls. She hoped her children would become bilingual\u2014they did\u2014and would soak up some European culture. Her husband agreed it was a great idea.\n\nNot that she wanted to take a sabbatical. \"I have a lot of jobs in Paris and London,\" she says. She also knew that, with her trustworthy team, she could manage her business from Paris if she commuted once a month to New York.\n\nAs soon as she made up her mind and got her husband's support, she flew to Paris to look at real estate. She was extraordinarily lucky. \"In one day I saw three or four perfect apartments,\" she says. \"I chose the one that was three blocks from my favorite Paris caf\u00E9, Bar de la Croix Rouge.\"\n\nThe apartment just happened to be in the seventh arrondissement, a coveted district among the affluent Parisians who call one another bon chic, bon genre. The apartment, on a high floor in a late-19th-century building with wrought iron railings and seven fireplaces throughout, had generous city views and lots of space 4,000 square feet, with a large entrance hall, a living room, a dining room, a library, a kitchen and five bedrooms.\n\nIt was also in good shape, which is important in Paris, where renovations can be a nightmare (\"We just put in a new kitchen and new baths and opened up the doors between the living room and the library,\" Baird says).\n\nShe had to have the family settled before the beginning of the school year, so she had the apartment quickly painted in neutral colors, such as pale yellow, white and forest green. Then she went shopping.\n\n\"I wanted to create a French version of cozy chic for family living far away from home,\" she says. \"And I had to do it fast.\" First she bought upholstered pieces that didn't need to be ordered, like the living room sofas, which were floor samples. She purchased a sisal rug for the library and yards of taffeta in different colors for draperies, and bought lamps and shades.\n\nThen she added accessories a 19th-century French oak mirror and a pair of blackglass 1940s low tables from a shop on the rue Jacob, a 19thcentury painting of the Madonna after Raphael, an oil of the fish market in Nice and two Toulouse-Lautrec lithographs. She also bought a pair of late-19th-century berg\u00E8res, 18th-century iron andirons and a porcelain garniture.\n\n\"The way I decorated this apartment was the way the French decorate,\" Baird says. \"When you see something, you get it and then figure out where it will fit.\"\n\nShe always tries to save her clients money and frequents the Paris flea markets. \"The dealers all know me because I buy so much,\" she says.\n\n\"They smile when they see me coming. I pick the objects, and my husband negotiates the price.\"\n\nHer flea market finds for the apartment included a vintage leather chesterfield sofa and two matching chairs, a pair of gilded and white-painted wood floor lamps, a carved wood headboard, console tables, three Louis XIV-style armchairs, a black desk, a pair of bookcases, two additional armchairs, a pair of stone cherubs and a silver serving dish.\n\n\"I love shopping for specific things in the flea markets; it's a bit like looking for Waldo,\" she says.\n\nPerhaps her best find was an antique tall case clock made of fruitwood. (\"I like fruitwood because it can be very elegant, but it's relaxed,\" she comments.)\n\nShe brought almost nothing over from New York\u2014three Chinese panels for the dining room and two large berg\u00E8res. So how did the Paris apartment work out? \"My husband says it's his favorite home,\" Baird says. \"I like the apartment's casual feel. But the best part was being in Paris, where culture is so accessible. We took the kids to Florence to see Brunelleschi's dome. We went to Pompeii. Everything was so easy to arrange. Living there was a dream.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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