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"View Slideshow\n\nWhen Annabelle Selldorf first saw her clients&amp;#39; future home\u2014a sprawling 1980s tract house in a pastoral exurb north of Manhattan\u2014she had three four-letter words for it: &amp;quot;drop-dead ugly.&amp;quot; The only charm she could discern in the property, apart from its spectacular site bordering a nature preserve, was as a location for The Sopranos. What else was one to make of a crazy-quilt fa\u00E7ade of faux fieldstone; a master bath that could serve as a safe-deposit vault; decorative moldings \u00E0 la Home Depot; can lights in dropped ceilings; a cavernous family room tastefully painted raspberry and pistachio; and a catalogue greenhouse with tinted automotive glass? &amp;quot;Can&amp;#39;t we just take it down?&amp;quot; she pleaded.\n\nBut her clients held their ground, convinced the structure had enough integrity to be redeemed. They were equally confident that Selldorf, a New York-based architect with a reputation for rigorous but humane modernism, could work the miracle of redemption. &amp;quot;They weren&amp;#39;t intimidated by my reservations,&amp;quot; she says gratefully. &amp;quot;I admired their mettle and thrived, as did the project, on the challenge of their tough love. The wife had very energetic ideas about what she wanted in a country house: comfort and clarity without pretension. Because we&amp;#39;re both rather forceful characters, we agreed that if we didn&amp;#39;t see eye to eye, neither of us should compromise her principles. Like good sailors, we&amp;#39;d triangulate\u2014 steer toward a third reference point.&amp;quot; The journey, apparently, was always bracing: a feat of mutually respectful teamwork.\n\nAs the busy husband chose to be a passenger, the executive crew consisted of four women: the wife, Selldorf, her project architect, Sara Lopergolo, and the landscape architect, Miranda Brooks. Their first goals were to rationalize the goofy layout; terrace and plant the grounds; move a fireplace that blocked the views; adjust the elevations; reconfigure windows and doors; and strip the rooms of their &amp;quot;gratuitous detail\u2014which is putting it politely,&amp;quot; says Selldorf wryly.\n\nOne of her early edicts was to banish cars from the front courtyard\u2014&amp;quot;That&amp;#39;s so suburban!&amp;quot; She then refocused the entrance, designing a luminous formal gallery wide enough for a baby grand piano and juxtaposing &amp;quot;very plain&amp;quot; white plaster walls with antique hemlock paneling. The same rich wood brings soul to the great room, where Selldorf used it for the steeply pitched ceiling and beams. While she didn&amp;#39;t alter the original volume of this vast living and dining space, she tempered its severity with a bank of French doors, walls of white plaster, a Roy\u00E8re chandelier and a mantel of weathered pine. It now exudes the dignity of a Bauhaus chapel along with the warmth of a New England barn.\n\nAs the metamorphosis began to gather momentum, Selldorf punctuated the low browline of the old roof with dormers and added a children&amp;#39;s wing and a screened dining porch in the farmhouse vernacular. She also created a new family entrance conceived as &amp;quot;an extended mudroom, in shades of apple green, fitted with ultraspecific storage cupboards.&amp;quot; All the fixtures in the original kitchen were scuttled and replaced with antique cherry countertops, custom cabinets of painted wood and an island surfaced in gleaming stone.\n\n&amp;quot;In an ideal house,&amp;quot; says Selldorf, &amp;quot;the sequence of spaces, private and communal, has an emotional logic that dovetails precisely with the needs and habits of its occupants. That&amp;#39;s what makes for civilized living. Through this door, the children rush in from school and dump their backpacks; there, guests arrive for a party; on winter nights the family gathers by the fire; when the foliage is ablaze, they dine on the porch, a transitional space between the landscape and the interior. A full-time country place should be attuned to the seasons and to the rhythms of life in its rooms. Anticipating and responding to them really matters to me. In that sense I&amp;#39;m very traditional.&amp;quot;\n\nThe renovation took a relatively brisk if intense eighteen months, and Selldorf had to begin designing the interiors while the construction was still in its &amp;quot;messy&amp;quot; stage. &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s always difficult to think about the soft stuff while you&amp;#39;re grappling with the hard stuff\u2014to coordinate fabrics while you&amp;#39;re pouring a foundation. But you have to, because of lead times.&amp;quot; Yet she loves &amp;quot;playing with textiles and color \u2014the weirder the better,&amp;quot; although weird is not the obvious adjective for this architect&amp;#39;s palette. There are flashes of amber and turquoise, but Selldorf, like the Inuit, must have a hundred words for the nuances of snow white. Then there&amp;#39;s green, from celadon to verdigris, and black, from beluga to slate. The master bedroom proves just how sensuous restraint can be. A window seat upholstered in charcoal cotton overlooks a pond; the plaid bedcovering is pashmina; Asian antiques\u2014a Chinese armoire, a low table from the Philippines \u2014mingle serenely with slipper chairs in tufted ivory velvet.\n\nSelldorf and her partners designed a games table of antiqued walnut for the living room, but she and the client shopped together for most of the furnishings. They explored the galleries of London and New York dealers who specialize in twentieth-century masters like Jacques Adnet, Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouv\u00E9, but they also trolled local flea markets for &amp;quot;funky lawn furniture and amusing, rustic bric-a-brac,&amp;quot; in Selldorf&amp;#39;s words. &amp;quot;So you see,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m not a fundamentalist about purity or a fan of coercive minimalism. While I hate clutter, I&amp;#39;m not averse to mixing styles and periods if the pieces are great. We accumulated the nineteenthcentury Windsor dining chairs one by one. We put together a fine and rather daring collection of modern art photography. My client was surprised, I think, that she took such a shine to midcentury furniture and Italian glass. Her enthusiasm wasn&amp;#39;t academic\u2014 she didn&amp;#39;t care if this sideboard or that lamp was \u2018important.&amp;#39; She let herself be guided by desire.&amp;quot;\n\nPerhaps one can never chart a straight course to perfection. But with desire as a compass and an aesthetic mariner as gifted as Annabelle Selldorf to read it, one finds the way."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/selldorf-article-072001>