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"View Slideshow\n\nAn elegant, petite lady in cashmere and diamonds whom we shall call Do\u00F1a X is the matriarch of a South American family with houses on several continents. It's a close-knit clan, and to join it, she says, \"you have to love horses.\" Every winter, three generations jet north to spend the season in Palm Beach, Florida. \"We're drawn by the sporting life more than by the social scene,\" she explains. \"My husband is an avid polo player, and our daughters, who ride competitively, both married great equestrians.\"\n\nFor many years Do\u00F1a X and her husband, who stables his world-class mounts in nearby Wellington, owned a relatively modest house close to the man\u00E8ge. But when they became grandparents, they felt something roomier was in order. Don X, a decisive mogul, took about 30 seconds to buy the only property on the market with ocean and lake frontage. It was a newly built mansion with every luxury and then some, but dauntingly vast, so the couple delegated one of their sons-in-law to find a suitable designer. The head-hunting was as brief as the house hunting: It took a phone call to Juan Pablo Molyneux.\n\n\"So many Palm Beach houses are decorated like resort hotels. My model for this one was both cozier and more classical: a winter palace.\"\n\nThe Chilean-born Molyneux would have been an obvious choice even if he and the son-in-law hadn't been old friends and skiing companions. He may prefer the horsepower of his vintage Harley to a polo pony, but his approach to design is impeccably thoroughbred. \"Juan Pablo's taste is perfect, and we trusted him completely,\" says Do\u00F1a X. \"Confidence is essential when you're making costly decisions at a distance, from a swatch or a photograph.\" As Molyneux explains, \"The polo season had just started in Europe when we got the green light, so the family was abroad. The husband's directives were succinct: Preserve as much as you can,' he told me, but do as much as you can.' \" But if his clients gave Molyneux free rein creatively and were philosophical about the \"budget\" (the word makes Do\u00F1a X smile faintly), they also imposed a draconian time constraint: \"a year or nothing.\" \"We actually had about 10 months,\" says Molyneux, \"and a late hurricane in November brought work to a halt for a few crucial weeks.\" But by the move-in deadline\"in early January\"the doors opened to a revelation.\n\nThe quintessential Palm Beach dream house is a white stucco villa with zillions of square feet and a Spanish name. It would have been built in the 1920s by Addison Mizner for a client like J. P. Morgan. \"Mizner always finessed that fine line between grandeur and kitsch,\" Molyneux observes. His clients' spanking-new house was \"Mizner-inspired, but without the Mizner magic. Its architecture, you could say, was more of a theme than a style.\"\n\nWhile no one would ever accuse Molyneux of frugality, he accepted the challenge of imparting his ineffable stamp of distinction to the house \"without doing any major demolition.\" To aerate the solemn entrance hall, he bleached the woodwork and the cupola \"so that the space now feels like a lighthouse.\" Low-browed arches dividing the salon from the main gallery were replaced with a graceful, Ionic colonnade. He managed to conserve most of the millwork, but he embellished the moldings, lightened the paneling, coffered the ceilings and disguised some of the less felicitous ornamentation with trompe l'oeil finishes. In that respect, the walls of the main salon are a paradigm for the whole project. \"The shine of the Venetian plaster doesn't come from a coat of varnish,\" Molyneux explains. \"The pigment is built up in layers so that it glows from within.\" The d\u00E9cor was also built up in layers: a subtle accretion of detail, texture and luminosity.\n\nThe salon faces the Atlantic across a broad swath of lawn hedged with bougainvillea, and Molyneux took his palette of gold, turquoise, citrine and ocher from the landscape. The carpet\"an antique Kerman commissioned by a shah of Iran\"is a suitably royal anchor for princely furnishings. A pair of Neoclassical mirrors on either side of a Dubuffet (\"They open imaginary vistas,\" Molyneux says) came from a Borghese palace. He orchestrated an ensemble of objects, fabrics and antiques that vie in splendor with one another but harmonize in refinement. As is often the case in a Molyneux interior, the monarchs of France are well represented: by a rare, giltwood chandelier and a stone fireplace (Louis XIV), a painted bench (Louis XVI) and an early Boulle \u00E9tag\u00E8re (more Sun King) that is filled, a bit heretically, with ceramics by Picasso.\n\nWhatever the house lacked in history, its \"rational\" layout earned Molyneux's approval. Two symmetrical pavilions are skirted by loggias on the first floor and terraces above them. Each room has a discrete character. The \"family room,\" on the first floor, is a saffron bower with a refectory table and Venetian chairs. The exuberant floral print on the walls and windows was copied by Portuguese weavers in a needlepoint carpet. When the husband wants a bit of solitude to study some gentlemanly subject (like bloodlines or futures), he retires to the library, from which all Gallic daintiness has been banished: The antiques are English and Russian.\n\n\"So many Palm Beach houses,\" Molyneux says, \"are decorated like resort hotels. My model for this one was both cozier and more classical: a winter palace. Every room has a fireplace. Every room has opulent draperies. And the mood is festive.\" It is festive most sublimely in the formal dining room, a fantastical jewel box that Molyneux describes as his \"homage to Mizner.\" Neither the homage part nor the Mizner part is immediately obvious until Molyneux ticks off an inventory: \"Gilt-embossed leather walls, a Regency-style table, Queen Anne chairs, a Venetian chandelier, a Roman cabinet, Imari dishes, a Louis XIV console, Japanese vases and a coral ceiling of Chinese lacquer.\" Mizner, in the end, was a conjurer: an American illusionist whose work transcends the pastiche of styles he imported to Florida. Molyneux channeled that sleight of hand by creating a patrician vernacular\"an expression of ease and solidity\"that gave a new body an old soul."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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