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"  Barbara King: You really injected this place with a megadose of pizzazz. Amanda Lindroth: It needed a kick in the pants! The house was an old-fashioned grande dame with great bones, but it was a bit too staid and lackluster. It was crying out for some oomph, a spirit of island festivity. I wanted it to have a bigger, bolder personality for a young Texas family \u2014 a couple and their two pre-teen boys\u2014who come to Lyford Cay, in the Bahamas, on holiday. What was the first thing you thought about doing when the clients showed it to you? I immediately thought, How in the world are we going to cope with the miles of pink terra-cotta tile and all the Sheetrock walls? And then I thought, Let&amp;#039;s start with the yellow exterior, paint it white to give it a sharp, modern, young look, and add orange-and-white-striped awnings for a happy, tropical feeling. Let&amp;#039;s shake up the neighborhood! No one here had done anything that audacious before, and now everyone is talking about that screaming tangerine. It makes them smile. And you brought big blasts of orange inside, too. Isn&amp;#039;t it a hard color to live with in such quantity? Not if you&amp;#039;re on vacation. Orange feels like a party, a festival. It&amp;#039;s not a typical decorating color, that&amp;#039;s for sure, although it seems to be having a moment right now. And I really felt it was the right moment for this house and these clients. It might be hard to live with if this were a primary residence. But my clients were gung ho about going all out with orange \u2014 they became so enamored of the color, they&amp;#039;re even painting their golf cart. You&amp;#039;d have to be in love with orange to say yes to such a zesty bedroom \u2014 that room is out there. The foyer is pretty over-the-top, too. Hugely over-the-top. But foyers should be a wow! What better welcome is there? You enter, and you&amp;#039;re instantly uplifted. You know you&amp;#039;ve been transported to the tropical splendor of a resort. This one definitely has a fantasy element, a sense of theater, like a stage set. My thought was to impart the language of the Lyford Cay Club\u2014which is much more Brighton Pavilion than a typical Caribbean Colonial house \u2014 with this amazing treillage. You admit to having a few die-hard obsessions, like vintage rattan, grass matting, and stripes. Are you also obsessed with treillage? Ha! I am. And in this case, trelliswork wallpaper wouldn&amp;#039;t have been good enough. The scale of the foyer required the real McCoy. It was created by Philippe Le Manach from Accents of France. He&amp;#039;s so masterful, he was picked to restore the treillage on the Pavillon Frais at Versailles. But you&amp;#039;ve got to have a master when you do this kind of intricate trelliswork. Then we had to tackle the fleshy floor tiles. We brought in the super-talented Haleh Atabeigi, who is Mario Buatta&amp;#039;s go-to decorative painter. When we finally saw that glorious green-and-white floor, we were completely bowled over. There&amp;#039;s no threshold between that space and the living room, and one of my assistants looked me in the eye and said, &amp;#039;Amanda, you cannot keep that fleshy pink living room floor.&amp;#039; So we had Haleh paint that floor faux-bois, and once we realized what a transformation it was, we got her to paint the rest of the floors on the ground level. The house wouldn&amp;#039;t have been successful if we hadn&amp;#039;t. And would it have been successful if you hadn&amp;#039;t done something about the Sheetrock? Never. Too often, new houses \u2014 although this one is about 20 years old \u2014 feel lacking, compromised. There&amp;#039;s too much Sheetrock and not enough interesting millwork. Walls need some love! We added wallcoverings to several rooms, and in the upstairs TV room and the bedroom hallway we trimmed the grass cloth with French grosgrain ribbon because it&amp;#039;s such a nice, finishing detail. It reminds me of an Herm\u00E8s or Jo Malone box. The living room has a quiet elegance. You don&amp;#039;t consider it off-kilter with the rest of the house? No. It would have been too much buzz coming in from the outside with those dramatic awnings, through the foyer with the elaborate treillage, into another exaggerated space. I wanted to leave the core of the house calm. It&amp;#039;s actually inspired by an image of Ralph and Ricky Lauren&amp;#039;s living room in Round Hill, Jamaica, which had white walls, white upholstery, a Chippendale mirror, 1950s rattan chairs, and grass matting. To add a stately element, I put in two Georgian-style tables. I wanted something grand, like you see in old plantation houses. I was trying to mix high and low, in an extreme way. It strikes me as a great house for entertaining. Do you always have that in mind when you design interiors? Oh, yes. One hundred percent. That&amp;#039;s one of the great pleasures of living here, to entertain at home. I think about how they will set up for cocktails in the living room. Are there enough lightweight, pull-up chairs for extra seating? That kind of thing. In this house, I envisioned them having lunches and dinners out on the porch. It&amp;#039;s so beautiful to sit out there at night, with the lights reflected in the pool. It&amp;#039;s a magical way to end the day. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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