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"View Slideshow\n\nWe came in the night,\" James Huniford says of the first time he, Stephen Sills and their clients approached a late-nineteenth-century converted tavern in the hills of Westchester County, forty-five minutes north ofManhattan. \"It was a cold March, there was no power, and it was pitch-black,\" confirms Sills. \"But we all loved the property, and our clients bought it having literally seen it only in the dark.\"\n\nBy morning the true beauty of the land was to be revealed: nearly fifty acres that offered panoramic views of the valley below. The house itself was set on the crest of a hill, overlooking a lake.\n\n\"Our clients, with whom we'd collaborated on a previous project in Manhattan, work very hard in their professions and love the city,\" says Huniford. \"But she wanted a dog.\" Her husband insisted she couldn't have a dog until they had a country house, and so, he says, \"we had to have a country house.\"\n\nDespite its good looks and reasonable layout, the house had become dour over the years. For the first nine months attention was focused on structural changes. To expand the interior volume, the designers converted the attic into a third floor and the basement into a casual dining and entertaining area.\n\nWhen it came to the interiors, which were dark and stuffy, Sills and Huniford's main objective was to increase light. They accomplished this not by enlarging the windows or by opening up walls but by brightening the rooms' palettes and refinishing brown beams, doors and floors.\n\n\"The dining room was the gloomiest of all,\" says Sills, \"and the brief was to design a room that would be intimate for two or twenty people.\" Many of the original features, such as the flagstone floor, were retained, and other elements were spruced up, but it was the hand-stenciled wall treatment that transformed the room. Reminiscent of Ottoman motifs, the pattern gives the room an aesthetic lift. \"It's a painstaking task, but it's valuable,\" says Sills.\n\nThey also designed the limestone-topped refectory table, which pulls apart to form three individual tables. The high-back dining chairs are Dutch, and the French chandeliers date from the forties. \"We actually have five dining areas, since entertaining is what we like to do most,\" says the wife. \"Where we dine depends on the weather and the formality of the occasion.\"\n\nThe long living room is divided into two distinct areas, one a cozy, contemporary arrangement by the fireplace, the second a similar grouping at the opposite end of the space. Between them is an oak center table from Sills and Huniford's new company, Dwellings. The walls were coated with a pigmented plaster to make them look aged\u2014\"a bit contemporary, a bit country,\" according to Sills. The wide-plank floors and worn beams were lightened and stained. The result is a textured backdrop for a cornucopia of treasures\u2014a side table made from a two-foot-tall hourglass, tole palm leaves once owned by Cecil Beaton, Florentine pots and eighteenth-century European carved fruit and flower finials.\n\nStairs from the entrance hall lead to a mezzanine, then to a master bedroom, which looks like a long gallery. Dormer windows and a sloping roof, coupled with sizable and heavily grained wood furniture, give the suite a rustic quality. The furnishings are a marriage of several styles and periods: an early-nineteenth-century American bed with gilt stenciling, a 1940s French zebrawood desk and an Italian Baroque\u2013style sofa. At one end of the room, a pair of twentieth-century leather slipper chairs make an elegant setting for a fireside chat, their symmetry echoed by two antique English file cabinets flanking the fireplace.\n\n\"One of the reasons we like working with Stephen and Ford is their ability to combine things from different orientations,\" says the wife. \"When other people do it, it just looks eclectic.' \"\n\nThe guest bedroom, also on the second floor, needed an infusion of light. \"The goal was to make it a warm and inviting space year-round,\" says Huniford, and he and Sills decided to paint the walls gold. The desk\u2014an architect's table\u2014and the steel-framed bed are not unusual for stylish country houses, yet the combination of the ebony bedside tables and a sturdy desk chair by Jean- Charles Moreux with early- to mid-twentieth-century objects gives the room a cosmopolitan sophistication.\n\n\"It's always been a European practice to bring fine objects together with the not-so-fine and to collate them in a subtle manner, or to mix the historical with the modern,\" explains Stephen Sills. \"It's something Ford and I like to do, but we do it in an American way.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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