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"View Slideshow\n\nAt the start of something,\" says Emma Burns, \"you think it's simple and straightforward. Then you get into it, and you discover that much more than you thought needs to be done.\" That's a truism that all designers soon learn. But when they are working on a tropical island, they discover it sooner rather than later. And when the island is Mustique, which is scarcely larger than a tablecloth, they find out instantly. \"Almost everything for my client's house was made in England, then brought in by sea,\" says Burns, a designer for the English firm Sibyl Colefax John Fowler. \"That in itself is quite a challenge.\"\n\nPlantation House, as her client's house is called, was built 35 or so years ago, not long after Colin Tennant, now Lord Glenconner, started development on the tiny island, 110 miles west of Barbados. It was designed by the late Arne Hasselqvist, the Swedish architect who had worked closely with Oliver Messel, Tennant's chosen design czar for the island. To Hasselqvist's dismay, his plan was crudely altered even before construction began, creating an awkward layout and destroying the house's symmetry. Still, when Burns's client, a woman with a busy life in London, bought the house and its 17 acres, she had no idea it would take five years to carry out the remodel, \"just a bit of a rejiggering,\" as Burns calls it, \"just a light refurbishment.\"\n\nAs Burns and her client began work, they realized that they would have to do a lot of jiggering before they could start rejiggering. The client is an art historian whose special field is the 18th century, a period when the first rule of design was symmetry and the second was simplicity. \"I love symmetry and scale and proportion,\" she says, \"and the previous owners didn't quite have the same taste.\" In fact, her predecessors had put the master bedroom where Hasselqvist had planned the main entrance, destroying any sense of symmetry, as well as blocking any hope of a cooling breeze from the trade winds. \"We went back to Arne's blueprint,\" says the client. \"He was thrilled.\"\n\nThough he drew a few sketches and discussed what he hoped to do, Hasselqvist was killed in a house fire before he could see the update manifested. Burns and her client then took on the job of rebuilding. \"There's nothing new in life,\" Oliver Messel once said. \"There's nothing that hasn't been explored in some shape.\" Following that maxim, the two women spent hours looking at old houses in the library of London's shrine to the decorative arts, the Victoria and Albert Museum. \"It was a very slow and a very long process, designing and building this house,\" says the client. \"But I wanted to get it right. Plantation House was my dream, and Emma and Sibyl Colefax John Fowler helped me realize it.\"\n\nPlantation houses on Barbados and in other parts of what was once the British Caribbean provided some guidance, and they also got a few ideas from Dutch houses in the Netherlands Antilles. But Burns's client does not like Caribbean gingerbread, the ruffles and frills that often surround the doors and arches of the houses on those tropical islands, and she found greater inspiration in the more formal style of plantation houses in the American South. She liked the calm reserve of George Washington's Mount Vernon, for instance, as well as the peaceful feeling of The Oaks, a plantation house in South Carolina. The result of all that research is what the owner describes as a \"mixture of Caribbean, Dutch and South Carolina. Throw in a dash of Oliver Messel, and you've got a lovely salad.\"\n\nThe entrance to any house is like the first few lines of a novel: The opening establishes the pace and theme for everything that follows. To give the house a proper entrance, her client made what Burns calls \"a quite dramatic change.\" She moved the master bedroom to a different spot and restored Hasselqvist's original plan\u2014a front door and a very wide hallway. \"The entrance is simple but elegant,\" Burns says, \"and it sets the tone of the house. It's island formal, which is a nicely pared-down version of formal. It's an easy space for guests to come to. My brief was that the house should be totally calm and monochromatic. She wanted the house to be a completely relaxing place to be in, a total escape from London and everything her life is about in London.\"\n\nThe new owner does not relax alone on Mustique, however. Besides visits from her two grown children, she is usually surrounded by a phalanx of house guests. Before dinner those friends can relax in the living room. \"The idea was to have a feeling of fantastic space,\" says Burns, \"and it's huge. But it doesn't feel as if you're in a barn. The furniture is laid out so that you can seat two, four, six, eight or more. It's comfortable for a lot or for a few. All the furniture is low so that you can look out. Nothing clutters the fantastic view of the ocean.\"\n\nLarge, uncluttered rooms help people maintain uncluttered lives, and a serene and uncluttered life is what the owner wants when she walks through that wide entrance and into Plantation House. Before the work of modifying the house and its grounds got under way, a friend who had visited the site pointed out that she ought to protect a very old frangipani tree in the courtyard. Although it suffered during the process\u2014\"It went into a grump,\" she says\u2014that redoubtable tree survived. In fact, it seems to have begun a second life, and today it is once again in blossom. Just like Plantation House."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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