the house of high spirits; The dynamic art consultant Brooke de Ocampo escapes her high-octane world for the gaucho life on her husband's family farm on the pampas.

In second grade, Brooke Douglass had "a total schoolgirl crush on a little boy from Argentina," as she playfully recalls. "We were all asked to do our first project: Pick a country and write about it. He did Argentina, and I wanted to do it, too. So the first really documented piece of literature I ever put my name to was on the country."

Two decades later, and the flaxen-haired

Connecticut-born beauty with the forget-me-not-blue eyes and the flashing smile finally found herself in the land of her girlhood dreams, her latter-day crush the dashing Argentine entrepreneur and historian Emilio Ocampo. "It was very funny because he's telling me all about the ...