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"View Slideshow\n\nTo make the long journey from the American Heartland to the other side of the rainbow, poor little Dorothy had to endure a tornado, a spinning farmhouse and the definitive hard landing. It would have been so much simpler just to hire Mario Buatta.\n\nSend Buatta to the Arctic, and he will not rest until he has re-created a spring afternoon in the English countryside. It's quite a talent, one that a midwestern family discovered nearly 35 years ago on their first decorating project with him. He has been their personal rainbow maker ever since, most recently at this deeply romantic house he created with Ferguson &amp;amp; Shamamian Architects, of New York, and Connecticut\u2013based landscape architect Peter Cummin, with help from regional design liaison Don Merrill.\n\nSend Buatta to the Arctic, and he will not rest until he has re-created a spring afternoon in the English countryside.\n\nThe clients live at the very midpoint of America, a rather straightforward place, but they longed for something more poetic, like the Cotswolds or the French countryside. Coziness meant everything to them, that feeling of warmth conjured up by a house that's mostly roof, with walls raised from local stone and hand-hewn timbers in every room. They wanted the whole dewy fantasy, down to the dovecote.\n\nThe project team found its inspiration in a long-deceased architect named Frank Joseph Forster, who built substantial houses of this sort in prosperous American suburbs during the early 20th century. From the few black-and-white photographs of his projects that survive, it's clear that his feeling for provincial houses, for the nook and the cranny, was unequaled. In 1931 he tried to explain the secret: \"They are a natural outgrowth of the soil on which they stand and of the lives of the people who built them.\"\n\nBuilding a new 8,000-square-foot house that looks as if it \"just happened\" is the ultimate dare for any design team. \"It was much more of a sculptural process,\" says Oscar Shamamian. \"Everything had to be done gently and suggestively.\" A dormer here, a hall there, a change of floor material, an unexplained angle, a dramatic leap in ceiling height\u2014these are the things that create a casual relationship between rooms, implying that this one-story house grew over time with the family's fortunes and the prevailing fashions. Yet, Buatta reminds us, \"Everything\u2014everything\u2014was put in by us.\"\n\nOf course, the structure was just the canvas for Buatta's fanciful version of the English country style. The living room, which has a 23-foot-high ceiling, lent itself to the house party atmosphere he's known for, with many seating groups, and the perfect mix of florals and patterns and solids, and objects that would be the envy of any shopper. Buatta created a sitting room for the wife with the tufted chair of everybody's dreams, and a vaulted wine cellar furnished as a dining room, and an outdoor room as comfortable as any living room, and a guest room completely done up, from pelmet to sleigh beds, in a pretty blue print. Every surface celebrates decorating: There are pistachio walls, and pink ceilings, and floors stenciled with garlands, and a bedroom encircled with painted trelliswork.\n\nThe name Buatta is usually followed by a flip reference to chintz, leading many people to miss the point of him, which is that very few people can do what he does. As a student he was told that if he didn't understand how the Postimpressionist painters used color, he would never be a really good decorator, and he took it to heart. What most of us see as cording on a chair, for example, he sees as strips of color, like the shadow lines in a Bonnard or a Vuillard. \"I decorate the way a painter paints a canvas,\" he says. \"I have to play it out. Feel it out. I start with a board, of course, but then it needs a little of this, a little of that, until it comes together as a balanced composition. If you plan it all at once, it will look decorated.' \" Put more simply, he explains, \"it's like getting dressed. A little brooch here. A little pin there.\"\n\nShamamian, who once worked for Parish-Hadley, was an ideal partner for him, sensitive to what he was doing in a way architects sometimes are not. \"Great houses do not necessarily begin with a big architectural idea,\" he says. \"One must understand the nature and use of each room before one can presume to design it. Character and lifestyle contribute greatly to the design of a room and inform the greater architectural idea. In many ways, we designed this house from the inside out.\"\n\nFor coziness, no room in the house can touch the master bedroom. True followers of decorating may have a flashback upon seeing it, to the 1984 Kips Bay Show House in New York, where Buatta created the bedroom that shook the world, with extravagant draperies whose linings were so beautiful they made grown decorators weep. This bedroom has that same frothy feeling, with a pale lavender glaze, valances that echo the shape of a French armoire, a 19th-century Italian crystal chandelier shaped like Phileas Fogg's balloon and a tour de force bed: a canopy bed with gauzy fabric spilling from its coronet. One also can't help noticing that the room has every imaginable type of upholstered seating. Could any room possibly be more comfortable?\n\nThe room is also an excellent illustration of the one immutable law of decorating according to Mario Buatta: \"Never believe a man who says he doesn't like a canopy bed.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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