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"Barbara King: Quick quiz: What word best captures the spirit of your house? Brian McCarthy: Scrapbook. It&amp;#039;s not about fabulousness or decorating for decorating&amp;#039;s sake. I can walk you through, and there&amp;#039;s not a single thing I can&amp;#039;t tell you about \u2014 where it came from, when, whether it&amp;#039;s from my life before I met my partner, Danny, or from our combined lives. Pick one and tell me about it. The Directoire bed in the living room is the first piece of French furniture I ever bought. I was working at Parish-Hadley \u2014 this was about 25 years ago \u2014 and two dealers in New York were going out of business. Sister Parish and I went there one day, and I ended up buying the bed along with a wonderful embroidered cover, which she was ready to knock my lights out for. I said, &amp;#039;I&amp;#039;m sorry. I saw it first!&amp;#039; I was living with nothing at the time, but I had an interest in 18th- and 19th-century European furniture, mostly French. The first apartment I did for myself was very Parisian \u2014 and very decorated. I would never do that look again in a million years. Why French in particular? I liked the architectural quality, the lightness of the lines. So I began to collect. And you kept on collecting. Most of the French pieces are from my past life. My zeal has moved on to art and objects, but I&amp;#039;m not driven to acquire things in an academic way. There&amp;#039;s a coherence to what I collect, but if you ask me to define what it is, I couldn&amp;#039;t begin to tell you. I just buy what I love, what strikes my eye. Collections create the layers that are what give a house heart and soul. Those layers are a narrative telling the story of a life. A house ought to be reflective of your passions. If a client came to me and said, &amp;#039;I&amp;#039;m passionate about pickup sticks. I want to do a whole house around them,&amp;#039; I&amp;#039;m telling you, I&amp;#039;ll take that passion and run with it. Come to me with your idea, and I&amp;#039;ll embrace it! That&amp;#039;s assuming it&amp;#039;s not a horrible idea, of course. Unlike pickup sticks, you mean? I could probably do something really interesting with them. I could come up with some exciting modernist creation. I&amp;#039;m already imagining Sol LeWitt paintings. What did you imagine here? Danny and I knew we wanted a Greek Revival house \u2014 it has a purity of form we both love. I use the term very loosely, because our house is sort of a dumbed-down, humble, American farmhouse version of the style \u2014 what I call &amp;#039;Midwestern Greek Revival.&amp;#039; But it was two years before there was even a semblance of a completed furniture plan. When we finished building the house, we moved in with nothing except a card table from Staples, a leather coffee table from my old apartment, and four Saarinen chairs. And then we said, &amp;#039;Let&amp;#039;s get whatever we have in storage and bring it up here.&amp;#039; Over time, we&amp;#039;ve added and subtracted, but it&amp;#039;s not a deliberate house. Not deliberate \u2014 now that&amp;#039;s an intriguing word choice. I mean that there&amp;#039;s a kind of looseness to the way things are put together. I was greatly influenced in that regard by Albert Hadley. Architecturally, a house had to be correct, but there was nothing rigid about Albert&amp;#039;s interiors, or Sister&amp;#039;s. The beauty of the Parish-Hadley approach was the eclecticism. I think that&amp;#039;s one of the things that&amp;#039;s so great about American style: the wonderful amalgamation of things, the way they&amp;#039;re mixed. There&amp;#039;s a certain casualness to it. And yet there are definite elements of a very well-ordered, traditional plan here. Oh, absolutely. I started with the classical structure \u2014 the architecture \u2014 but then softened the edges. It&amp;#039;s the same with our garden. Which, to me, conjures the English country gardens of Russell Page and Gertrude Jekyll \u2014 that dreamy blend of formal and natural. You&amp;#039;re spot-on. The garden has an architectural sensibility, but it takes off from the formality with a certain wildness. The plants begin to billow and flow. When we bought the property \u2014 it&amp;#039;s 16 acres, five of them are our gardens and the other 11 are an alfalfa field \u2014 there wasn&amp;#039;t a tree or a blade of grass. So I started spending my Sunday mornings walking around with my sketch pad and doing scenarios of where everything should be \u2014 every shrub, every border, every path; the pergola, the pool, the lotus pond. Your pergola is like a little Greek temple in the woods. Thank you, Prince Charles! There&amp;#039;s a folly on the grounds of his country home, Highgrove House, that I fell in love with. This is my interpretation. Are you and Danny always in sync with the way things should look? Sure. Well, before we moved in, he made this sort of broad declaration: No Louis XIV, no Louis XVI. It&amp;#039;s a country house in America, and he didn&amp;#039;t want museum-quality French pieces here. There are good pieces, but they fly under the radar. It&amp;#039;s not a precious house. We&amp;#039;ve got items we&amp;#039;ve bought for about $200.  Are you exaggerating? Not at all. The living room chandelier was $100 \u2014 and then, OK, $3,000 to electrify it! My jaw hit the floor when I got the bill. Still not exaggerating? I wish I were. But at the end of the day, it was worth it. It has a beautiful simplicity, and it&amp;#039;s one of the last things I would ever think to replace. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.housebeautiful.com/design-inspiration/house-tours/a1070/brian-mccarthy-interview-0413/>