The Anniversary House

part 2

But the core of every house, it seems, is the kitchen. "Everybody ends up there anyway,"says Pearson. And because of that, the kitchen and adjoining family/breakfast room are just as well furnished as the other rooms. Seating in the family room is turned at an angle so there are great views of both the fireplace inside and the loggia and gardens outside.

Equal attention was paid to the bedrooms, where extra square footage follows a decade-long trend. "Nobody apologizes anymore for making their bedrooms a spacious retreat," says Pearson. The master bedroom suite is a home within a home, with two separate dressing areas, cherry cabinets, and leather countertops. The master bath is luxuriously outfitted with a series of barrel arches in the ceiling that divide his and her vanities over a limestone floor.

The same attention to detail that characterizes the master suite is carried throughout the house and into the garden, where water jets can be turned on above the pool, offering a soothing, steady rhythm of sound that can be heard from one end of the house to the other. And Stewart's choice of soft colors works well with a fine contemporary art collection chosen by Neiman Marcus, which also provided exquisite dinnerware and tabletop accessories for the house.

"The final perception is one of quality," says Stewart. "In an old home, you have diversity. We tried to re-create that with materials that might extend from the 1920s or '30s."