Architect Jim Strickland designed the kitchen to look as thought it had been an addition, as many kitchens are in updated antebellum house. Clapboard walls and a paneled ceiling effect the look of a one-time screened porch; by keeping walls white to match the showhouse exterior and treating the floor to gray porch paint. High-performance SieMatic cabinetry and granite countertops meld right in. OPPOSITE: The adjoining breakfast room is a tour-de-force mix of styles that sums up the lighthearted traditional spirit of the house. Dining chairs from Hickory Chair Co., slipcovered in China Seas chintz from Quadrille, encircle a marble-topped Eero Saarinen table from Knoll. The area rug is by Elizabeth Eakins Cotton, the mobile from the Guggenheim Museum shop. Inside, the four-bedroom house has a symmetrical orientation around a central entry hall. A combined living and dining room comes directly off the hall, with a kitchen adjacent; breeze-ways lead to a master bedroom suite on one side and a studio and office on the other. Upstairs are three bedrooms, two for the children and one for guests. Who might buy such a house? We imagined a family from Boston or Chicago, two cities with uncharitable winters and direct flights into Savannah. They might be in their mid-forties, with a boy and a girl in grade school, in search of a place where the kids could have their independence and soak up some southern history (perhaps unconsciously). Dad could get back on a horse after twenty years, Mom could lean to play golf, and the kids could mess around with some boars, at least until the tennis lessons began. Such a family would want an easy going house, we decided, one nice enough for entertaining or putting up the occasional guest but not so fancy that they'd worry about leaving it empty most of the year. It might also be fun to give it a historical inflection and see how their taste, considered somewhat flamboyant back home, would translate to a more traditional context. THE DECORATOR If anyone could take that script and run with it, it was Thomas Jayne, whose oddly paired attributes - erudition in decorative arts history and an almost loopy sense of fun - made him the obvious choice for our endeavor. Town & Country recruited him in January. "What attracted me to this project was that it was about the process of making a beautiful house," says Jayne, 43, a graduate of Winterthur Museum Program in American architecture. And decorative arts; Christie's; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Parish Hadley. With his scholarly vocabulary, gentle-giant posture (at 6'7", he can wire a chandelier without a stepladder) and habit of wearing quiet bow ties, he comes off more like a tenure-track professor than a streetwise, whip-cracking decorator. But we knew otherwise. Working long-distance and straight from plans, as T&C was about to do, takes the guidance of a professional with know-how, imagination and gust, as well as virtual blood ties to the craftsmen and workrooms who will carry out his orders. Thomas Jayne wears his acumen lightly. So lightly, in fact, that his patrician interiors usually contain subtle forms of irony, whimsy, even kitsch, in keeping with his personality. (as our installation skated within hours of its deadline, Jayne hoisted a chair over his head at one point, yelling, "This could be a metaphor for the project!" It was Keith Haring's seat in the shape of a child, red arms outstretched in rage.) An appropriate response to the architecture of our house, Jayne felt, would be what he calls a "bridge interior" - one that is both historically appropriate and extremely comfortable. It's an approach he draws on a lot, and one that comes right off his own business card: "Decoration, Ancient and Modern." "I like old things," he says with gentlemanly understatement. "But I want them to look fresh - and that often comes from looking again at the old source and rethinking it, in color, shape and juxtaposition." Though Jayne's work has rarely been cited as trendy, we felt that this was precisely the right moment to sign him up. Coming into vogue with the speed of a bullet train are several of his longtime decorating preoccupations: color, in all its strength and allusiveness; patterned walls, whether papered or painted; and eclecticism, the pairs of old and new to make a room that's timeless and comfortable (rather than "curated," which, as any flea-marketer will tell you, is much easier to do.) The showhouse became a place for us to elaborate on these trends. continued on next page