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"View Slideshow\n\nWhen he was in the fourth grade, Thomas Pheasant went on a class trip to Washington's National Gallery. Standing in the spacious rotunda, a circle of quiet and calm in that city of warring factions, he looked around approvingly and said to himself, \"I could live here.\" A fourth-generation Washingtonian, Pheasant never found a home amid the museum's Vermeers, Turners and Raphaels. But two years ago he did find his own secluded oasis in America's capital city.\n\nHe had been looking for some time, instructing his real estate agent that since he traveled so much, he didn't want the burden of a big garden. But love has a will of its own, and when Pheasant walked through the door of a three-story house just a few minutes from his Georgetown office, it was love at first sight\u2014the sight being the big garden he could see through the back windows. \"I love to walk through a front door and look through to light,\" he says, \"and in this house you looked immediately back to the garden. I felt I was in California.\"\n\n\"You start with a blank canvas, and you could have a hundred ideas. Then you have to commit.\"\n\nExcept for that view to the garden, the house had some serious drawbacks for Pheasant. \"It was nice, but totally not me,\" he says, adding that it was far too formal, with Corinthian columns in the living room and only limited views to the pool and the expansive garden around it. Built in the 1990s, the house actually sits on two lots, giving it a luxury of space in the heart of a crowded city. What it needed, he decided, was not just a cosmetic face-lift but radical, top-to-bottom surgery. \"I basically gutted it,\" says Pheasant. \"I removed everything and changed the floor plan on all three levels.\"\n\nTaking his scalpel to the main floor, he removed a wall separating two salons. The result: one extra-large living room, 40 feet long and 24 feet wide, with not one but two fireplaces. \"It's so great to have space,\" says Pheasant. \"I'm usually working in rooms in which you wish you had more of it.\"\n\nSince it's impossible to have a single focal point in such a large room, Pheasant visually divided it with a high round table, which, like most of the other furniture in the house, he himself designed, much of it for the two furniture companies, Baker and McGuire, with which he is associated. \"When I designed those pieces, I was not even thinking about this house,\" he says, \"but it's interesting to see how easy it is to mix them together.\" With another flourish of his scalpel, he raised the openings of the living room windows and, where the wall once ended, carved out a new window facing the garden. \"The views,\" he says, \"are now spectacular.\"\n\nNo less spectacular are the views from the dining room, which also has new windows, new doors and new molding. \"I wanted it to feel very airy and bright, with a mix of elements,\" says Pheasant. From stores in Paris, where Pheasant and Juan Carlos Rincones, his companion of 25 years, have an apartment on the Left Bank (see Architectural Digest, February 2003), came 19th-century English chairs, mirrored sideboards and a French crystal chandelier. The chandelier was broken and in terrible condition when Pheasant first saw it, but it had a shape and an elegance that he admired.\n\n\"There's not a piece in that room I don't love,\" he says. \"That's how I want my clients to build their interiors, not just filling a room with furniture, but with objects they really love.\"\n\nOn the third floor, Pheasant took out his scalpel again and removed a wall between two bedrooms, creating a large, 30-foot-long master suite. \"The walls are ivory linen, and the predominant color is gray,\" he says. \"The use of a neutral palette here and in the other rooms keeps things open, and during the day the house is filled with light.\"\n\nFor Pheasant, being both the designer and the client was a sobering experience. \"When you're designing for clients, you're creating something so they'll be comfortable,\" he says. \"When you're designing for yourself, you're isolated. You're really answering to yourself. You start with a blank canvas, and you could have a hundred ideas. Then you have to commit. You're also paying the bills, so you're very aware of what things are costing.\"\n\nHow satisfied is Pheasant the client with Pheasant the designer? Let the house, another refuge of quiet and calm amid Washington's frenzied politics, answer the question. \"This house showed me where I am as a designer,\" says Pheasant, \"where I've come from and how I've built my career. With it, I'm basically putting my shingle out. I'm saying: I stand behind this. This is what I think is right.' \""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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