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" Christine Pittel: There&amp;#039;s got to be a story behind your name. Podge Bune: I was a 12-pound baby. When I came out, the midwife said, &amp;#039;What a podge!&amp;#039; and that was it. You&amp;#039;re English, so that must be why you gravitated to this rose-covered cottage. Oh, if you&amp;#039;d seen it \u2014 it was a generic 1970s gray house with an asphalt roof and Sheetrock walls, sort of a cardboard box by the sea. My husband said, &amp;#039;You&amp;#039;ve gone mad. You can&amp;#039;t do this one.&amp;#039; I said, &amp;#039;Just you wait.&amp;#039;  Clearly you&amp;#039;re brave, which I should have known from the pink paint on the exterior. If you want a quick change, open a can of paint. I thought pink would be fun and whimsical and mask the fact that the house had absolutely no redeeming architectural features. I also added more boards to the board-and-batten to make it a crisscross, and put on a Hansel-and-Gretel wood-shingled roof. Inside, we added the tongue-and-groove paneling and the beadboard to make it feel more substantial, and we painted everything white. So light and airy. I took down a wall and now it&amp;#039;s basically one big room with the fireplace, the telly, the kitchen, and the dining area. The rest is just bedrooms. I&amp;#039;ve always wanted a house with one big room where everybody can do their own thing and nobody is left out.  How do you hang 29 pictures on one wall? Where do you start? The first that went up were the two over the fireplace. Then the mirrors. They&amp;#039;re just Louis-something style, not old. And then I sort of whacked the rest up. But look at those two columns on either side of the fireplace \u2014 you&amp;#039;ve paired the pictures. It&amp;#039;s not conscious. I don&amp;#039;t really think about it. I&amp;#039;ve got them all on the floor and I can just see which ones will go with which.  It&amp;#039;s the symmetry that holds it. You have to have a little bit \u2014 two mirrors, two lamps, two consoles. I found the consoles at an antiques mall. They&amp;#039;re not a pair, but I ripped the tops off and put a piece of pink-and-white marble on both. Blue velvet on a sofa is not the usual choice for a beach house. It&amp;#039;s that wonderful French silk velvet \u2014 it used to be curtains I did for a client, who then got married to a very modern wife. So the curtains landed on my sofa, complete with that outrageous French bobbin trim. There&amp;#039;s something enticing about those two chairs by the fireplace, which seem to be sized for Munchkins. They&amp;#039;re boudoir chairs from about 1900, covered in an old Colefax and Fowler geranium print. I&amp;#039;m mad for chairs, and those are terribly comfortable. Every-sized person sits in them. You&amp;#039;d be amazed. The easy chair is covered in my old dining room curtains, a Designers Guild fabric they no longer make. Is there any reason why all these fabrics are in the same room? None, except that they have all been in my life. How do the English get away with this? Sheer charm and no calculation. My house is a collaboration of things, either inherited or collected over a lifetime. It&amp;#039;s eclectic. It&amp;#039;s cluttered. A young girl from Poland came to help me clean \u2014 I said, &amp;#039;I&amp;#039;m sorry there&amp;#039;s so much furniture.&amp;#039; And she said, &amp;#039;Don&amp;#039;t worry. You&amp;#039;re English.&amp;#039; I have done more modern things for clients, but that wonderful pared-down American simplicity of Halston or Calvin Klein is just not in my DNA. That&amp;#039;s all right. You&amp;#039;ve got patina. Just look at those old dining room chairs. Actually, those aren&amp;#039;t old. They were plain brown wood, from a department store in London. I went to the Isabel O&amp;#039;Neil school in New York to learn how to do decorative finishes and painted those for my distressing class. So not exactly a quick change. Definitely not. It&amp;#039;s layers and layers of Ronan paint, a special oil paint with a lot of pigment, starting with a dark color and ending with a light. And you wet-sand it between every layer. When you put in the time, you get these incredible results. I&amp;#039;m curious about the living room mantel. Is it original to the house? No, I saw it on 1stdibs.com. It&amp;#039;s old pine, carved with sea motifs, and it reminded me of one we used to have in the house I grew up in, with sheep and shepherds. Then I slathered the brick surround with cement and stuck stones from the beach into it. That was quick. I would have obsessed over each one. You mustn&amp;#039;t overthink it. When I walk into a room, I see it done very quickly and I seldom change my concept. I&amp;#039;ll walk round it in my mind and it&amp;#039;s all there, like a movie playing in my head. I think in pictures, and I also have a good memory for color. If you said to me, &amp;#039;I want to match this sweater,&amp;#039; I could go and find you that color without having your sweater in my hand. That&amp;#039;s a wonderful gift. I do it with cooking, too. I can taste and smell everything when I go shopping. The other night we had scallops with a passion fruit sauce for dinner. As soon as I saw the ingredients, I could taste them all. So I bought them. And it was just as good as I had imagined. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.housebeautiful.com/design-inspiration/home-makeovers/tips/a840/designer-podge-bune-interview-0612/>