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"View Slideshow\n\nEven in the finest homes, life for most people is a series of \"befores,\" vaguely tending toward the sort of perfection implied by \"after.\" There's always the rug that doesn't work, the telephone wire that should not be visible, the wing chair in need of reupholstering. And much as we cringe at our own past lapses in design, \"before\" can also be lovely: Those chaotic years when we are rearing children, building companies and never quite getting the house together often turn out to be among the best times of our lives.\n\nBut \"after\" is nice, too. And tried to restore traditional elements with a previous designer, but the result had just left them frustrated. \"Everybody'd had a go at this house,\" observes Sandra Nunnerley, the New Zealand\u2013born interior designer to whom the couple turned for help. \"But no one had left it feeling whole. All its poor bones were in disarray.\"\n\n\"I told the owners that, through design, we were going to make them use the entire house.\"\n\nNunnerley could not help noticing how badly the main floor of the house functioned. \"When I arrived, the family was living in the kitchen,\" she recalls. The living room \"was all cut up, full of clunky things, and it had tiny carpets,\" all the result of an earlier redesign. \"There was just no way to sit. That part of the house was never used. I told the owners that, through design, we were going to make them use the entire house.\"\n\nShe then moved on to the master bedroom, which a previous owner had opened with their two children about to become teenagers, the owners of a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, decided their moment had come. \"It was time to really make it a house that we loved,\" says the wife, \"and not just a place to park ourselves.\" From the outside, the Normandy-style structure of gracefully half-tried timbered brick already looked perfect. It was solid and substantial, handsomely situated on three hilltop acres, and secluded within its own wooded border. The first time the wife walked out the French doors onto the rear terrace, she looked around and thought, This is a place where my children could get married.\n\nInside, on the other hand, it was a mess. Generations of owners and designers had stripped away old moldings and substituted bits of modernism, bits of Mediterranean, bits of high tech. The owners themselves had up to the third floor. There was a mezzanine loft along two walls, and the effect was a bit like waking up in a bedroom on the air shaft of a Manhattan apartment house, with a view of the neighbor's fire escape across the way. \"It was very open,\" the wife remembers. \"It didn't have any intimacy to it.\"\n\nWorking with her architectural associate Thomas Gay, the designer brought the ceiling back down and gave it a shallow vault, for the illusion of height and a rounded sense of enclosure. The hand-painted wallpaper, custom-made in China to match the dimensions of the room, created the feeling of a walled garden, and new cabinetry concealed the clutter of books, television and stereo system. \"We both like good music,\" says the husband. \"But what's visible is the view out to the woods.\"\n\nAnother key step was to add a conservatory off the living room as a kind of solar magnet to draw the family to that side of the house. The couple decided to keep this room as a quiet space for reading the paper and doing homework, to Nunnerley's delight: \"I'm so tired of designing rooms around televisions!\" she exclaims. The designer wanted to give the room the feeling of a tree house (well, you know, the sort of tree house that has a coffered ceiling and 19th-century lacquered-bamboo Chinese bookcases). Architect Gay planned the exterior of the conservatory to echo the windows of the main house. A second-floor geometric railing also picks up the pattern of the timbering in the brick and incidentally encloses a new terrace off the master bedroom, which now also opens to the woods.\n\n\"Everybody'd had a go at this house, but no one had left it feeling whole.\"\n\nThe result is a house that draws the family from room to room over the course of the day. It doesn't announce that a designer has been there. In the living room, for instance, many of the original pieces of furniture have survived, including a homely upright piano that was important to the family. But a large carpet now unifies the space, the seating is arranged in groups that actually invite people to sit down, and the dark stain of the wood floor adds a subtle note of drama to the low-key palette. It is, in fact, a place to live, not one of those homes, as the wife puts it, where \"you're stuck just looking at the house, instead of focusing on the individual.\"\n\nThe pared-down character of the design and the handcrafting of the objects on display clearly please her. \"You see all the details without any of it being overdone,\" she says. Of Nunnerley, she adds, \"I really wanted to be pushed a bit. She brought me to things I would never have gotten to on my own.\"\n\nAs she speaks, she runs a hand over the Venetian glass of a 1940s sconce: \"I find myself spending much more time at home than I used to. I sometimes feel when we're in our bedroom that there is no country inn that would be more beautiful.\"\n\nThere are of course things still to be done: a marble floor in need of honing, an office still being planned. But no house is ever finished. The home the clients have ended up with is neither a \"before\" nor an \"after\" story. But it is a lot of very nice \"now.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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