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"View Slideshow\n\nThe house looks fairly typical, at least from the outside in. Located in Quogue\u2014\"the closest place in the Hamptons to New York City,\" its owner points out\u2014and built in the Shingle Style, it sprawls, elegantly and expansively, just as such residences have done on Long Island's East End for more than a century. With its action-packed roofline and a tower that seems lifted from a fairy tale, it fits nicely into the vernacular.\n\nBut when it comes to the interior design, it's best to leave any preconceived ideas at the front door. Inside, the 12,000-square-foot weekend residence has neither the much-loved, ramshackle quality of a vintage Shingle Style home nor the cavernous blankness that\u2014all too frequently\u2014can characterize newer ones. What it possesses instead, distinctively and inimitably, is the touch of Penny Drue Baird.\n\nBaird takes a tactician's approach to color, deploying it \"to give each room some real personality, separating one from the next.\"\n\n\"It's a challenge to make these houses warm up and not seem too big,\" explains Baird, who, besides decorating the house, worked on its interior architecture too. (The architect is David DiGiovanni.) Joining the project when the building was being framed allowed her to reconfigure some of its spaces, including the dining room and master bedroom, removing walls in the process.\n\nWhile the designer is known for her commitment to French taste\u2014she keeps an apartment in Paris (see Architectural Digest, September 2006), and her latest book is titled Bringing Paris Home\u2014she actually works in a variety of styles. \"Whatever people ask me to do, I do,\" she says. \"I really have every look and every style.\"\n\nShe describes her design as \"a nod to the beauty of the beginning of the 20th century.\" In the amply proportioned, double-height entrance hall, some arresting pieces from the 1930s are on display, from a curvy French iron-and-glass chandelier to a futuristic-looking console that seems to sprout, artistically, out of one wall. Baird, who has \"sources as far away as Capri,\" she says, found the latter piece in Florence; like so many in this residence, it exerts an influence disproportionate to its size.\n\n\"Each room has a feature that marks it,\" she points out. \"It's not just a white box.\" Nor is this imposing space, which she grounded in multiple ways, using paneling that looks as if it had been lifted from a Shingle Style prototype and a surprisingly warm-toned limestone floor (from France) that, most certainly, does not.\n\nBaird imagined the interior in two parts. One side, consisting of the living room, combined library and bar, and master bedroom, is more formal. The other, more casual, side includes the dining and family rooms. On the second floor, there's a guest room and two separate wings\u2014one for each of the couple's children and their families.\n\n\"I wanted our house to be light and airy and fresh,\" the wife recalls. Baird responded with a palette that, while pale in the entrance hall, seems to intensify exponentially in each subsequent room. She takes a tactician's approach to color, deploying it \"to give each room some real personality, separating one from the next.\" Even so, she wields it with caution: \"I'm careful to leave some areas white\" (in this case, both the entrance hall and the curvilinear, multiwindowed solarium beyond it, which dazzles with light).\n\nThe living room, at first glance, shimmers with silvery shades; on closer inspection, it reads darker. (The wife describes it as \"pretty neutral with pops of bluish green.\") Baird walks a fine line here, contriving a \"highly polished space in a house that, as a country residence in a beachy town, is almost obliged to be casual. \"Because I have young families, I didn't want it to be too serious,\" remarks the husband, who's a Manhattan-based real estate developer. The result is both smart and lighthearted.\n\nThe soaring limestone fireplace surround, which anchors the room, was, like others in the house, found in France. (Some are antiques; others are new but made of old stone.) Intriguing detail abounds. As throughout, Baird installed moldings that, she says, \"have that D\u00E9co feeling\" (here, strikingly, on the ceiling). The Karl Springer mirrors on either side of the fireplace are \"marquetry-ish,\" Baird says. The consoles beneath them come from one of her favorite sources, the Paul Bert flea market in Paris. The low table, a clever amalgam of Lucite and glass from the 1950s, was also acquired in the French capital.\n\nOther spaces, particularly the dining room (Baird notes that it has a \"D\u00E9co motif\"), demonstrate the designer's style at its most sophisticated. She transformed the room with some inventive detailing, including wine cellar doors at each of its four corners, two of which are faux. The room's striking mahogany trim works nicely with a pair of dark wood dining tables (already owned by the clients), as does the intriguing ceiling molding, which she conceived, she says, \"to add interest and depth.\"\n\nBut it's the family room, texturally rich and done in a calming, practical palette, that best exemplifies another aspect of this house\u2014and clients. Located across the hall from the living room, this space, where the couple's grandchildren tend to congregate, could be its more laid-back twin. The sofa's luxurious, nubby fabric can withstand the most vigorous somersault; other elements, including a chic pair of lamps made of linked metal rings, could hold their own in a raucous pillow fight, or worse.\n\nBaird's coup is that, in what is quite literally a two-sided house, each one is as aesthetically successful as the other. Which is just what these clients were after. As the husband says, summing it up, \"Penny reads us very well.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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