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"View Slideshow\n\nSome houses are conceived and executed in a sweeping, fluid gesture. A client meets an architect or a designer, or both; a harmonious rapport develops and, with it, a cohesive vision. Construction is a breeze; the landscaping goes in easily and quickly flourishes; a good time is had by all.\n\nMore realistically, however, certain houses\u2014especially large and intricate ones\u2014come into being by a more circuitous route, and the results can often reflect not so much the struggle along the way as the ambitions of the owner or the designers. When in the late 1990s Paul and Trudy Cejas began building an Italian villa at Indian Creek Village in Florida, they could not foresee that Bill Clinton would soon appoint Paul Cejas ambassador to Belgium, a post he held from 1998 to 2001.\n\nFor Axel Vervoordt, the spirit of a house lives in the touch of a human hand.\n\nAs ambassadorships trump the construction of houses any day, quite understandably construction on the Cejases' villa came to a standstill. What was the house like when they set off for Brussels? \"A shell,\" Trudy Cejas recalls. \"A quite good shell, I believe, but not much more than that.\" The couple had hired Joe Brennan, a Palm Beach-based architectural designer, and he had helped them realize their long-held dream of building a neo-Palladian villa in Florida. Why Palladian? \"Well, for one thing, Paul and I have always loved everything about Italy: architecture, art, design, all of it. For another, there's the landscape; with all that Spanish influence, Florida seems receptive to the Mediterranean sensibility.\"\n\nSo Palladio it was, with a footprint in the shape of a large Greek cross, and a two-story portico of Doric and Ionic columns flanked by matching wings pierced by symmetrical windows, the whole capped by a roof of terra-cotta tiles. The house was substantial, well sited and well made\u2014and almost completely lacking in interior resolution.\n\nThis is where the unforeseen encounter can have a transforming effect on a house, as on a life. Many years earlier, the Cejases had seen a house in Maastricht whose interiors, which were designed by the charismatic Axel Vervoordt, had moved them inscrutably but deeply. \"Never in a million years,\" Trudy Cejas remembers, \"did I think we would end up in Belgium and meet Axel and his wife, May, and, in time, ask them to help our house.\"\n\nWhen Axel Vervoordt \"helps\" a house, the experience is all-encompassing. Vervoordt visited the structure and pronounced its bones worthy but\u2014perhaps unavoidably\u2014lacking in soul. \"How do you bring soul to Florida, how do you find the spirit of a new house?\" This became the designer's refrain.\n\nHis solution was multifaceted and characteristic of his previous work, while being very carefully calibrated to the taste of the Cejases, who have a formidable collection of paintings and antiquities and strong ideas of their own about design and decoration. Naturally, Vervoordt first resolved the interior floor plan (with help, on the practical side of things, from Stephen Siegel, an architect who had worked on the Cejases' Manhattan apartment), and then he set about unleashing\u2014though for the most part, of course, creating\u2014the house's notably absent spirit.\n\nFor Axel Vervoordt, the spirit of a house, whether the structure itself is new or old, lives in the touch of the human hand. The craftsman, with his natural materials, his old skills and nearly forgotten techniques\u2014this is where Vervoordt inevitably turns when he begins expressing his interior design. \"For me, natural materials are critical,\" Vervoordt explains. \"Especially in Florida, where there is so much that is fake, you must be honest, you must be organic, you must be true.\"\n\nOf course, Vervoordt is too deft simply to specify throwing a walnut doorframe up, for example, varnishing it and leaving it at that. Alison Antrobus, the project's on-site design director\u2014for three years she basically lived in a trailer parked out front\u2014remembers the day the decorative painters arrived from Belgium to execute Vervoordt's finishes. \"Axel had told me to leave all the walnut casing alone. I thought: In Florida? In that weather? Then the painters came and applied a concoction, a mixture of something like crushed walnut shells and the sap of an exotic tree, and rubbed it into the wood, and, I tell you, the grain began to pulse, the walnut came alive. I'd never seen anything quite like it.\"\n\nAntrobus watched as pastelone, the original form of terrazzo, went down on the floors in several of the public rooms and faux-marbre spread across the dado in the dining room. She watched as old recipes for paint were mixed up by hand, like something out of the Renaissance, and antique parquetries were painstakingly reassembled in the library and dining room. And she saw the master himself arrive and arrange the furniture and objects he had sleuthed out or (as with most of the upholstered pieces) designed or helped the Cejases to find.\n\nFor all his decorative alchemy, Vervoordt definitively believes that a house must express the personality of the owners, not the designer: \"The Cejases like sophisticated painted and gilded furniture. I myself might have put in early-Italian furniture, but, you see, this is why collaboration stretches everyone.\"\n\nWhile the clients already had a striking collection of modern art, Vervoordt helped expand their interest in antiquities. Trudy Cejas had been a longtime collector of Roman glass, but the Palladian rooms wanted more emphatic objects, hence the Roman torsos and Greek pots, the Roman mosaics adapted into low tables and the Corinthian capitals used beside chairs. \"The house, being so new, and being filled with modern art, needed a bridge that reached across time to span the years.\"\n\nAnd so, in the end, can a spirit be said to have come forward in this new building, and if so, what kind? \"The thing no one tells you about Axel's work until you live with it,\" Trudy Cejas observes, \"is how serene it is. Whenever I walk into this house, my shoulders drop. It's the strangest thing.\"\n\n\"Not so very strange,\" says Vervoordt. \"Interior design is a kind of magic. Never underestimate the power of the human hand. What I'd hoped for here was the flavor of a big Italian house with little corners balanced and worked to look like jewels.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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