Crazy for color.(STYLE)

Byline: RUTH LANDO

"I am totally thrilled when someone connects with my love affair with colors, all the mixing and matching to shake up interior design concepts," says Daphne Goodyear about her University Park home. "I'm expressing a sense of humor in design."

Indeed, when Daphne and her husband, Richard Vining, went about designing their home, they had the same thought in mind: "Let the furnishings and accessories design the house," says Richard. "That means let the floor and walls be neutral so that everything can pop better and you can enjoy the primary colors. It's pretty easy isn't it?"

What pops in this animated home is a cheerful melange of art, 18th-century antiques, Asian treasures, brilliantly colored textiles, witty furniture and accessories, and, most of all, Daphne's amazing handcrafted needlepoint designs. Daphne taught herself needle craft in 1972 as an antidote to boredom on frequent airplane trips. The diversity of her talent is staggering, and each design has a story or theme. On the living room wall over the white sofa hang framed examples of intricately stitched Faberge eggs; delicate Oriental fans and a full-size Japanese kimono executed in five shades of purple. She had craftsmen sew blocks of her luxe fiber artwork into the center of pillows, finishing them off with colorful borders.

A devotee of MacKenzie-Childs, Daphne enlivens her rooms with the company's complex geometric furniture, benches, ottomans and drawer pulls that accentuate her flair for color, texture and pattern. Every knob, drawer pull and handle in the house is either a MacKenzie-Childs creation or her own hand-painted one. In the living room, armchairs sport black-and-white striped Clarence House fabric, not lined in the traditional vertical mode, but horizontally, for greater impact. A purple Osborne & Little chair sports lavish Houles black fringe …