---It was my primal need to preserve those sorts of archaeological details that Thomas had to contend with. When my great-grandmother died, and the green sofa moved from her house to my grandmother's, Mr. Rodgers placed it against the wall opposite the fireplace, hung the cricket player above it, flanked with a pair of parcel gilt console tables, and topped them with lamps made of porcelain figures. Several hundred miles north and many decades later, I re-created that configuration, down to the photograph of my grandmother, mother and aunt that had always been on the table to the left. ---And until Thomas walked in I hadn't done much else. I'd painted and glazed the walls yellow (badly, with the help of an Irish painter) and covered the floors with a mousy carpet. Things were falling apart. The sofa hadn't been covered in 60 years; the once-brilliant yellow pillows hung in dull, beigey threads. ---While many of Thomas' conversations with me took the form of earnest pleas, Mr. Hadley says Mr. Rodgers' consultations with clients were entirely dictatorial. "The decorating world was different then. You would go to Mr. Rodgers and he would tell you what you would have." Poor Thomas. "We have to paint these walls," he said. I was so proud of my handiwork I was blind to their deepening cracks, the clumps of glaze in the corners. "Absolutely not," I said. He announced he'd "pray about it," and apparently wise strategy since a professional decorative painter, my talented and close friend Anne McGee soon arrived from New Orleans to fix things. Next, Thomas suggested replacing the wine-stained carpet. I suggested cleaning it, a compromise that held until my increasingly incontinent cat finished it off. .   We laid sisal down after the magnificent Sam left us ---One day Thomas arrived with a pair of green vases painted with nasturtiums. "How about these for lamps?" I loved them but it was a jolt to see them on those stately consoles. Even my mother voted no. However, Thomas, as usual was right. The new lamps provided some oomph sorely lacking from the 50-year-old tableau.I insisted the sofa stay green, but Claremont's "Lampas" silk pillows provided more oomph, as did the Dutch Baroque leather screen that hides the wall-through air conditioner.Mr. Rodgers was partial to Meissen; Thomas steered me toward Chinese vases, needed counterpoints to the over-the-top candelabra adorning my mantel, Nashville relics I know he remains in perfect horror of. ---Last on the list were some pieces of modern art. I called John Alexander, who's been one of my favorite painters even longer than he's been my friend. John, originally from Beaumont, Texas, has a fine sense of the absurd and a love of nature that has translated into works The New York Times compared to Dürer. So when, in a fit of guilt, I asked him to immortalize my about-to-be-euthanized cat in oil, he didn't flinch. Another of John's oils, Hesitant Bride on the Verge of Dunking her Monkey, bears an uncanny resemblance to a particularly dour relative hanging nearby, but that wasn't my father's first comment. "What the hell is that?" he asked when he saw it. ---Thomas taught me most about fabric and color. He never showed me a swatch I didn't love; he replaced the hallway's standard "linen white" with a deep olive that's a definite cousin to Mr. Rodgers' favorite green. But a color sense is not all the two men shared (they each worked with a hardheaded woman named Julia, for one thing). "Mr. Rodgers was a very dapper man," says Mr. Hadley.     "He was tall, with dark hair, rather Cole Porterish."Thomas is certainly tall six foot seven), dapper (he is always dressed in a tailored suit and bow tie) and Cole Porterish isn't far off. ---While Thomas would've been perfectly at home, martini in hand, in my great-grandmother's pale blue drawing room, his sensibility, like Mr. Rodgers', is thoroughly modern. Once, when Mr. Rodgers addressed the garden club at Mr. Hadley's mother's house (Mr. Hadley stayed home from school to hear him), an impolite woman asked what he would do to improve the room he was standing in. "Well," he said, not missing a beat, "I would have a banana rug." When Mr. Hadley told me that, I laughed out loud. I could so easily hear Thomas recommending the same thing. Perhaps on our next collaboration (or, more accurately theirs), we'll get one.