--- In the breakfast room, the decorator achieved the same kind of synergy without using antiques at all. He stared with four reproduction Martha Washington chairs from Hickory Chair Co., a form popular in the 18th century. When shrouded in Colonial-style slipcovers, the leggy, tall-backed chairs perfectly complemented an Eero Saarinen marble-topped pedestal dining table. The finial fillip: a Guggenheim Museum Shop mobile picked up for $375. "It's reasonable to say that the rooms couldn't have been more beautiful with a more expensive combination of elements," Jayne contends. "Decorating is about many thins, but one is knowing how to sue you resources wisely and economically. There's a financial and a visual economy at work here."
--- By April, we'd chosen the schemes for the major rooms. The house itself was framed and roofed. Though we tried not to feel we were racing the contractors, comparison were unavoidable. Dan Paquette, president of local
Sterling Construction Management LLC, always seemed to be one step ahead of us, waiting on our choices for hardware (Butler), bath fixtures (Kohler) and kitchen cabinetry (SieMatic).
--- As spring wore on and the house began to look more like itself, at least on the drawing board, a few more collaborators signed on. Chuck Hettinger and George Wittman, decorative painters from Manhattan, agreed to come down and create a cypress-paneled library in faux boiserie, and Robert M. Hicklin Jr., a Charleston dealer in southern paintings, offered to lend us whatever we needed. His contributions of oil portraits and still lifes by area artists were indispensable. We also borrowed some student twork from Savannah College of Art and Design, a wonderful local resource. 		--- A southern house has to have some southern content, and we relied on art a good deal, since antique furniture made in the South tends to be both expensive and hard to find. (The climate has never been conducive to preservation, and a lot of furniture was imported to start with.) As a compromise, we borrowed antiques from Guy Bush in Washington, D.C., and two New York City dealers, Kentshire Galleries and Florian Papp, that were made in the Mid-Atlantic, or in England, and that might have been sued in the South.
--- Eight weeks before the deadline, we were in great shape - better than the contractor, who had run into weather delays and was still waiting for shipments of marble and granite for countertops. (when the final shipment arrived broken, no one seemed terribly surprised.)
--- With his schemes all chosen and the workrooms taking calls from his office almost daily, Jayne and his team began shopping in earnest for the ephemera that would pull the project together. Every time one of them returned from an out-of-town job site, a lamp or an odd piece of porcelain would pop from a carry-on bag.
--- "You have to think globally when you decorate," observes Jayne's project manager Eric Smith, a man who knows his way around a customs form. "If you want a house to have some dimension, you really need to travel. We bought things not only in New York, but also in L.A., New Orleans, Georgia, Charleston, the Hamptons, Connecticut, London and Paris."
--- All of which makes the house sound much fancier than it is. Holding aside its nods to the current trends, historical reference and custom effects, it's still a comfortable place where
kids' kites hang in the studio and the Windsor chairs on the porch can afford to get rained on. They're copies, after all.
--- Feeling a little cocky after installing the last sticks of furniture on schedule, we decided to spend a night in the showhouse - to give it a test drive, so to speak. Would it function as well as it looked? (The showers Nwere still being tiled, so our expectations in that area were nil.) As we drove back to the darkened house after dinner, Jayne likened the stunt to his camping out in the backyard as a kid, and the moonless sky reinforced the point.
--- But once inside, we thought again. A chorus of lights came on with subtle precision. The SubZero refrigerators - there were two, one for each of us - were stocked with junk food left behind by the construction crew. The rocking chairs on the porch were comfortable and not yet old enough to squeak, so we glided quietly along, reviewing the success of the project we had begun eight months before, as the house cast an apron of light out onto the lawn. We tossed a coin for the silk-lined bedroom; Jayne won, as well he should have.
--- The next morning, over PowerBars at the Saarinen table in the breakfast room, with our gift-shop mobile circling above, we compared notes and agreed: the house was a success. The decoration was sublime. And no cub scout had ever come close to having this good.

The Town & Country Showhouse at the Ford Plantation will be open to the public November 5-26, 1999. The admission fee of about $50 will benefit the Georgia chapters of the American Diabetes Association. For more information, please contact the Fore Plantation, P. O. Box 2879, Richmond Hill, GA 31324; (912) 756-5666