THE QUALITY of the collection posed an unusual problem. "Usually you're dealing with antiques as accessories," says Jayne, "but here the objects are so good, you don't want to distract from them." He assembled a "committee of taste" (including an upholsterer and a museum curator) to make decisions about fabric and trim. Jayne researched historic, block-printed wallcoverings for the front passage. Cole & Sons, in London, carved new pearwood blocks to recreate a nineteenth-century pattern with an Indian design - one of many allusions to the couple's extraordinary collection of Asian antiquities. In a typical period room, you wouldn't find a fifth-century Indian lingam sculpture, used in fertility rites - unless, by chance, an eccentric ship's captain had lugged it home. But here, in the newly constructed stair hall, it fits, part of the fluid "essay in decoration" that is a Thomas Jayne interior.

The addition, by architect Richard Cameron, draws light through skylights inspired by those at London's Soane museum, through glass screens and through an oval interior window based loosely on one at a historic New York house. The new breakfast room, with its slightly elaborate swag curtains, is
a logical extension of the dining room, while the new sitting room, with ample windows, serves as a brilliant backdrop for the drawings room's double-peak sofa. The new staircase winds gracefully to the lower floor, with its card room and the collector's mother's bedroom. A far cry from the upstairs bedroom, with its folksy gauze curtains and painted floor, it has an English. Campaign bed from Florian Papp and oceans of chintz - a nod to her penchant for mid-twentieth-century luxury. As the collector and the decorator know quite well, that's American, too.