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"View Slideshow\n\nTrue love blooms in a multitude of ways. It can happen when eyes lock across the proverbial crowded room, on a blind date, at cruising altitude with a stranger on an airplane. If one is lucky in life, it is also possible to be struck dumb by a place, to know its rightness deep in your heart. \"We drove up the driveway, and I knew immediately,\" designer Jacques Saint Dizier says of his first glimpse of a Craftsman farmhouse tucked into the ancient redwoods and live oaks of Sonoma County, California. \"It gave me goose bumps.\"\n\nThe chemistry is still palpable between Saint Dizier and the warm, personal residence he has inhabited for 22 years, a place he likens to \"a clearing in the woods you'd stumble upon.\" The designer's formidable homing instincts kicked in early: As a 10-year-old boy from Louisiana Cajun country, he made his first trip to New York to attend the 1964 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows and was certain as soon as he stepped out of the taxi that one day he would live in New York.\n\nHis career began there under the tutelage of the late Angelo Donghia, whose dead-on eye Saint Dizier has inherited. \"He was gentle, calm, soft-spoken but so stylish, on the best-dressed lists for good reason,\" recalls the designer. \"He'd walk into a room and say, Move this to there and that to here.' He taught me so much about stirring the pot.\" When his mentor died in 1985, \"it sort of buckled my knees,\" Saint Dizier says, compelling him to reexamine his life in New York, the one in which stacks of r\u00E9sum\u00E9s were piled high on his desk competing for his job. At the suggestion of friends, he traveled to Sonoma County, whereupon he fortuitously learned about a hillside farmhouse with exquisite proportions and a wraparound porch built in 1912 by a lumber baron as a gift for his bride.\n\n\"I remember thinking, Give me a life with trees, a dog and a garden, and I'll be fine,\" Saint Dizier says about closing up shop in the wake of Donghia's death. \"That my career has followed me here, on my terms, has been the blessing of my life.\"\n\nThough his firm occupies a first-rate corner of Healdsburg and he commutes to Kona, Hawaii, and other A-list locales, outfitting second and third resort homes along with private jets and yachts, in his personal life Saint Dizier gravitates to the outdoors, despite being, as he says, \"an interiors person.\" Light infuses his residence through a large bank of windows facing the porch, enhanced by a screened door that is perpetually swung open.\n\nLocated 60 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge\u2014the tollbooth, to be exact\u2014the house is nestled in an aromatic horticultural Eden in which two of California's greatest hits\u2014the coastal redwoods and the twisting live oaks associated with the state's dry inland\u2014 converge. \"I definitely have country in my blood,\" says the designer, who grew up on Lake Charles, in Louisiana, and would occasionally roll up his pant legs and water-ski home from school.\n\nThough linoleum concealed much of the honey-colored Douglas fir floors, the period character of the farmhouse remained intact, down to the requisite stone fireplace with banquettes, redwood wainscoting and leaded-and-stained-glass built-in sideboard and bookcases. Hardly a by-the-book designer, Saint Dizier quickly jettisoned the overly earnest ghost of Gustav Stickley. \"It's not as livable as I'd like,\" he says of the period. \"I like to sink into furniture.\"\n\nIndeed, the sofa he designed for the living room, with antique-velvet-back pillows and leather seat cushions, is so tactile and curl-up-able that Saint Dizier likens it to a very large pet (his real one is a feisty Welsh terrier named Huey Long).\n\nIn designing for himself, versus for his clients, Saint Dizier is aware of a contrasting sensibility. \"In my work, I use a restrained hand,\" he notes. \"Everything is very high end, very structured, very well thought out. At home I don't want to tailor or structure things. I'm not running around thinking, Oh, this isn't right. It's all okay. I also learned early in my career that people can't relax in perfection.\"\n\nThe garden is perhaps the most gloriously okay place of all. Saint Dizier\u2014who once flirted with giving up design for horticulture\u2014relaxes profoundly in this lush, slightly out-of-control \"green cradle,\" which he has nurtured over the years from its beginnings as a barren slope. Plants and flowers seem to radiate happiness, from the golden plum tree and Japanese maple planted early on by the kitchen window to old-fashioned cascades of roses and geraniums, whose sheer exuberance threatens to subsume the pool. The pool is designed to resemble a volleyball court, complete with bleachers. \"We've had 18 people playing volleyball in there,\" says Saint Dizier. \"The residence is all about enjoying life and not taking it all too seriously.\"\n\nThat notion extends to the artwork throughout the house\u2014some of it by talented friends\u2014as well as the collectibles, including his whimsical die-cast toy trucks, which hold a dog leash and toys by the kitchen door and suntan lotion by the pool.\n\nComing home after his rough commute\u201411 miles through stunning vineyards\u2014Saint Dizier will often light a fire, even in the summertime, open the door and watch the sun set with a glass of wine from the banana-yellow porch swing (another gift). One of his favorite reds is a zinfandel from a vineyard just up the road, produced by a family he knows quite well. \"You can taste their personality,\" he says of the wine.\n\nThe same might also be said of Saint Dizier's residence. In the end, of course, a sense of intimacy and comfort with oneself may be the most profound design of all."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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