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"View Slideshow\n\nOne executive's move can be another's blessing in the transiency that is a fact of 21st-century corporate life. An executive spent two years adding a wing on to a 1930s Federal-style stone house in Westchester County, New York. As soon as the renovation was complete\u2014cork had even been put up on the wall of a prospective billiard room\u2014he accepted a position across the country. An executive who had been transferred to New York from a city to the south was eager to buy a house in \"move-in condition.\" He and his wife asked Jeffrey Bilhuber to decorate the Westchester house for them without tearing down a single wall.\n\nBilhuber, who had designed previous residences for the client over a period of 16 years, was delighted to take on this one. \"On more than half my jobs I'm up to my elbows in plasterboard and sawdust,\" he says. \"In this age of gut renovations and teardowns, it's very satisfying to be told to keep construction to a minimum. When I hear that walls are to stay, I do backflips up the driveway and get cracking.\"\n\nStill, there were a few changes to be made, starting near the front door. Bilhuber decided there was one door too many in the entrance hall. He closed up the one to the library and put a Queen Anne-style mirror on the new wall space. Below it he placed a Georgian walnut console with a green-marble top and next to that an English mahogany hall chair. The clients had previously chosen to live in contemporary houses, and their Manhattan apartment is sleek, but this time around they asked Bilhuber to buy 18th- and 19th-century English antiques for their year-round country residence and to combine them with their collection of 19th-century landscape paintings and modern art.\n\nThe entrance hall leads to a gallery hung with some of those canvases. Antiques include an early-19th-century English architect's table. \"The couple's young son often sits at the drafting table,\" says Jesse Carrier, the project manager for the house. \"You can usually find his crayon squiggles next to an atlas that's kept there.\" The gallery also serves as a music room\u2014the clients bought a piano and hope their children will take lessons someday. \"The piano is in line with the front door,\" Bilhuber points out. \"It's meant as a metaphor that music provides comfort and relaxation.\"\n\nThe designer took pleasure in buying two fun-house mirrors and hanging them in a hallway outside the children's bedrooms and in using a sofa with a leather seat in the family room. \"The children can sit and watch television, and it doesn't matter if they spill things,\" he says. \"There's a double chaise in the living room\u2014the room the former owners had intended as their billiard room. The chaise encourages curling up and sipping from a mug of hot cocoa in winter or from a glass of iced tea in summer, and what could be better than that?\"\n\nThe family spends a great deal of time in the kitchen, eating at the counter\u2014or at a small 18th-century drop-leaf table. Their 18th-century dining table, however, seats 12. \"I didn't want something that looked like a conference table, and I wanted comfortable chairs,\" says the wife. \"We looked at Regency chairs, but they were very uncomfortable, so we asked Jeffrey to make us upholstered chairs with low backs. He made four of them narrower than the others so that they would fit under the table's gate legs.\"\n\nThe dining room had been taupe; it was painted white. The master bedroom had been a stone color, and it became white as well. \"I'd always dreamed of a white bedroom,\" explains the wife. Bilhuber painted the ceiling sky blue. \"The blue makes the room seem so much whiter,\" comments the designer, adding that white makes one focus more on the antique furniture, which includes early-19th-century Bostonian bedposts (which Bilhuber extended an extra foot because of the room's extremely high vaulted ceiling) and a small octagonal table from La Fiorentina, purchased at auction. \"The master bedroom carpet is raffia, because it was used all through La Fiorentina when it belonged to Harding and Mary Wells Lawrence,\" says Bilhuber. \"It's the most beautiful woven carpet I can imagine. It's better than an Aubusson or an Ushak. It's easy to be indulgent, but occasionally it's preferable to be discreet and humble.\"\n\nThe executive insisted on a serene house. \"I didn't want a froufrou pretty house,\" he says. \"I wanted a handsome, masculine home, and I got it. This is the one place I can come to where accounting scandals and falling stock prices and whatever else is going on in the outside world don't seem to matter.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/bilhuber-article-112002>