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"View Slideshow\n\nIt was home, but Evelyn Lauder knew it could be better. When she saw her mother-in-law Est\u00E9e's Palm Beach mansion for the first time, she drove up to a big Neoclassical house so white \"it made me squint.\" The starkly planted gardens were a paean to labor-intensive pruning and mowing. And the decoration, some of which dated to the thirties, was more than a little dreary. The entrance hall, for example, was painted a gray beige and wrapped by a wainscot of gray, white and charcoal patterned wallpaper that was chosen by an earlier owner.\n\n\"What do you think?\" the cosmetics pioneer asked her elder son's new bride. Contemplating the dark, double-height hall, the daughter-in-law had an immediate answer. \"Est\u00E9e, this color is so grim,\" she replied. \"Why don't you paint it yellow? It would be so cheerful.\"\n\nThe senior Mrs. Lauder, carefully coiffed and immaculately tailored, smiled and said, gently, \"Evie, this house will be yours one day. And when that day comes, you can paint it yellow.\"\n\nEst\u00E9e Lauder kept things as they were. And a few years ago, when she retired, she kept her promise. Today the entrance hall is indeed the color that her son Leonard's bride suggested back in 1964, its walls painted the soft golden color of egg yolks whisked with dairy cream. Every square inch of the house has been altered, too, but the family's matriarch would nonetheless feel right at home.\n\nThe marquetry desk where she took telephone calls still stands in the library. The same tulip-strewn chintz is in her bedroom, though some of it has been replaced with fresh yardage. Painted a sharp candy pink, her shell-patterned iron chairs and tables remain on the oceanside terrace. And in the dining room, the early-thirties chinoiserie wallpaper depicting flowering trees and swooping birds has been replaced with a faithful reproduction of the deteriorated original\u2014though with stylistic twists that make the subtle point that a new generation is now in residence. The enamel-blue background has been turned up one vibrant chromatic notch, for instance, and, at eye level, a bevy of trompe l'oeil bugs has been added to amuse the matriarch's great-grandchildren.\n\n\"We made every effort to keep as much evidence as possible of my mother's life here\u2014and that of Mrs. Swenson,\" says Leonard Lauder, referring to a long-forgotten socialite who built the house in 1938 and some of whose eighteenth-century American antiques stayed in place when Est\u00E9e Lauder and her husband, Joseph, took up residence in 1964. \"There was so much history in the house as well as memories of my parents' love for it.\" Which explained why Lauder, the chairman of the company that his parents founded in 1946, happily accepted the house when his mother retired and began spending most of her time in New York City. \"To sell the house, to leave it, would have been unthinkable,\" he says.\n\nBut to leave it untouched, a musty if beloved album of fond recollections, would have been unthinkable, too. More than six decades of corrosive salt-laden air and punishing subtropical humidity had taken their toll on the mansion, which was designed by Marion Sims Wyeth, a New York\u2013born, Ecole des Beaux-Arts\u2013trained architect who was one of Florida society's leading maestros. Furthermore, the amenities that had been ultramodern in Wyeth's heyday were now considered old-fashioned. Not to mention scratched, scuffed, worn and peeling. And in some cases, dangerous. As Evelyn Lauder remembers, the walls were insulated with crumpled newspaper, and bare electrical wires were the norm.\n\n\"Every switch plate and every drawer pull in the kitchen was replaced, and every surface was scraped, replastered and repainted,\" reports Thad Hayes, a New York interior designer whose projects include the Lauders' Manhattan apartment, another residence whose high-style history has been maintained but improved. \"It was a very thoughtful process,\" says Hayes, who spent the better part of two years, with his project manager, Donald Blender, updating the Palm Beach house in collaboration with architect Jeffery W. Smith and landscape designer Mario Nievera. \"The objective was restoration. We wanted it to look pretty much the same as it did in the beginning.\"\n\nNevertheless, the goal was not to create a period-perfect movie set. What worked for the Swenson family in the late thirties and the elder Lauders in the sixties was not appropriate for twenty-first-century occupants.\n\nEst\u00E9e and Joe Lauder used the house as a seasonal escape, arriving in December and leaving in April. Their son Leonard and his family, on the other hand, are frequently on-site, as is the family of their younger son, Ronald, who lives next door in a Mediterranean-flavored villa designed in 1924 by the same architect. (Both houses each recently received a Ballinger Award, presented by the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach.)\n\n\"For us, this is a weekend house,\" says Leonard Lauder. \"And we spend a week or two here at various times throughout the year.\" Further distinguishing the generations\u2014and the differences in personalities\u2014are the wood tree house and the plastic playground equipment sitting out back for the couple's grandchildren. The kumquats that were picked up and thrown away in the senior Lauders' day are now harvested and processed into homemade marmalade. And there is the newly renovated oceanfront terrace and pool banked by towering hedges of bougainvillea, ficus and Australian pines.\n\n\"My mother-in-law rarely entertained outside, and when she did, it was usually under a tent,\" says Evelyn Lauder. \"She and my father-in-law lived their lives indoors. She didn't like the wind to mess up her hair. It was a different, more formal time. I like being outside; I like keeping the windows open.\"\n\nAt first, the house's new chatelaine had the notion of recasting it as a neo-Caribbean fantasy, a graphic scheme of flowing white draperies and dark mahogany furniture. She liked the romance of unlined draperies catching ocean breezes and sunlight streaming across bare polished-wood floors. A cooler, more practical mind prevailed in the end, however. \"Leonard centered us,\" says Hayes. \"He was the one who kept us grounded, reminding us of the objectives.\" As Leonard Lauder kept saying, \"A close friend of ours gave us the best advice possible: You have to respect the house.' There could be no grand gestures.\"\n\nEverybody involved agreed: The building's construction date would dictate the d\u00E9cor, which meant reviewing the work of thirties and forties designers such as T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, Pierre Chareau, Jean-Michel Frank, Andr\u00E9 Groult and others, masters of strong, clean silhouettes and simple luxury. But the Lauders' forty-odd years' worth of accumulated antiques also had to be taken into consideration.\n\n\"That's what made this project unlike anything else I've ever done,\" Hayes points out. \"So many times, a client will tell me to start from scratch. Contrary to popular opinion, that's not always what a designer wants to hear. We had a house full of furniture\u2014some of which Est\u00E9e had bought at an auction of the original owner's belongings, which meant things that have always been here\u2014and we had to choose what to keep, what to replace and what we would do with what was left.\"\n\nThe challenge was to fit the heirlooms into a modern but casual aesthetic. \"I like things pared down; I like simplicity,\" says Evelyn Lauder, who is a senior corporate vice president at the family firm as well as an accomplished photographer and the founder and president of a leading breast cancer research foundation. \"I also like houses that relate to their surroundings. Palm Beach is basically tropical, but too many houses here layer on the silks and the brocades. They don't embrace the climate; they avoid it.\"\n\nWith that environment-conscious sensibility in mind, Hayes and the Lauders stormed the house, room by room, armed with color-coded tags designating what to save, what to sell. Much of the dated upholstery and fussier furniture went out the door, save pieces with specific personal associations. \"Leonard's a sentimental guy,\" notes Hayes, an observation with which his client wholeheartedly agrees. \"You can't separate a house from a family,\" says Leonard Lauder. \"It's a living, breathing home.\"\n\nWhat changed most was the spirit of the house: What was formal is now relaxed. Serious art was ruled out in favor of less precious creations such as Leonard Lauder's vintage travel posters. Whimsies abound, courtesy of the camp-appreciative lady of the house\u2014there are crystal palm tree lamps, for example. Spherical Venetian glass chandeliers from the forties were installed in halls near the entrance of the house, where they dangle, Hayes says, \"like big drop earrings.\" The Art D\u00E9co bath fixtures were meticulously restored and set off with thirties to fifties wallpapers exuberantly printed with caladiums and cut-leaf philodendrons. When a new breakfast room was built near the kitchen, Hayes created a set of dining chairs after a strong but simple wood one he found languishing in the attic.\n\nOutdoors, Mario Nievera loosened up the starchy landscape with frothy, foaming masses of tropical and subtropical plants. \"It's less in-your-face now,\" says Evelyn Lauder, referring to the fa\u00E7ade's stark-white severity. \"It feels more like what it should be: a beach house.\"\n\nAnd no room is off limits. \"When the Lauders are here, children are everywhere, and everybody's in shorts and jeans,\" comments Hayes. The space that best conforms to this new attitude is the living room, once a rarely used entertaining space that is now an invitingly d\u00E9gag\u00E9 family magnet distinguished by a sophisticated array of objects\u2014family heirlooms alongside ethnic exotica and custom-made modernity.\n\nCurvaceous armchairs by Pierre Chareau cozy up to streamlined but deeply cushioned back-to-back sofas dressed in leaf-patterned cotton. The walls are washed with soft light from a quartet of gilt plaster sconces that Diego Giacometti cast in the thirties for Jean-Michel Frank. Although its crowning finial went missing years ago, Est\u00E9e Lauder's burlwood Georgian secretary still stands between the front windows. The cosmetic queen's traditional commodes, however, have been replaced with hefty Hayes-designed bronze consoles whose foggy glass shelves resemble thick slabs of ice.\n\nIn another example of the persistence of memory, electrified nineteenth-century Japanese bronze oil lamps sit on low lacquered chests once used to store kimonos. \"We have the same arrangement in our Manhattan apartment,\" says Evelyn Lauder, a devotee of Asian artifacts since the late fifties, when the couple went to San Francisco on their honeymoon. \"I bought a Japanese lacquered box and a couple of candlesticks for our bedroom,\" she adds. \"Ever since, I've had Japanese accessories.\"\n\nSurveying the living room's fresh splendor is an oil painting depicting Est\u00E9e and Joe Lauder, circa 1965, standing proudly in the same room but surrounded by the ultratraditional furniture that it once contained. Chez Lauder, the past is always present, honored by but coexisting, quite happily, with what is new.\n\n\"It's about love, really,\" says Evelyn Lauder. \"We wanted to make our own imprint here, but we didn't want to erase Est\u00E9e and Joe from the house. There's too much emotion to be considered.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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