a grand tour; Carolina Irving transformed a classic prewar apartment into a dramatic setting for whimsical treasures.(Biography)

Byline: Hamish Bowles

h! But you don't know the beauty!" exclaims Carolina Irving, sloe eyes flashing with passion. In fact, she says it often-one moment over the ruby stars of a Rosa glauca's blooms, threaded "like an Elizabethan enamel" through the tapestry gardens she has wrested from the spindly woods of Long Island's bohemian Springs. In another moment her fervor has transferred to the enchanting flowering meanders of an eighteenth-century document cotton that she found in Sweden, or the turquoise glaze of an Iznik dish from the Istanbul bazaar.

Her personal style, like her decorating, is all about an insouciant mix of lovely things. Carolina will wear ethnic Matisse blouses with Parisian pencil skirts and teetering heels from her friend Christian Louboutin or sling a homespun belt found on Patmos around her hips as she ignites her Ingres features and expressive hands with the magically clouded sparkle of old-mine eighteenth-century diamonds found at London's S. J. Phillips.

Born to Venezuelan parents and raised in Paris, Carolina was trained to beauty at an early age. Her mother's elegance was afforded the apt backdrop of a Jansen-decorated apartment in the Art Deco Walter building in the comme il faut sixteenth arrondissement. Carolina playfully recalls its "dictatorial chic," and a dining room that was "all painted chalky-white vernis martin with gold boiserie, with beautiful inserted panels of seventeenth-century Chinese Coromandel screens, and lacquer-red taffeta curtains. It was seriously the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

She went on to study archaeology and art history ("a selfish pleasure") at the cole du Louvre, where she specialized in seventeenth-century Italian art, and later worked for the World Monuments Fund on a two-year project in Peru to document and archive Cuzco School paintings that were then being flagrantly looted from remote churches. "You'd go into these Baroque churches in the middle of nowhere in the Andes," she says, "and the altars were covered in emeralds and gold-it was astonishing." In Manhattan, where she subsequently decamped, she met and married the droll and dapper Englishman Ian Irving, then in the silver department at Sotheby's and himself possessed of the eclectic instincts that one would expect from the expert in charge of the legendary 1988 sale of Andy Warhol's wide-ranging collections.

The marriage was celebrated with high style in the gardens of a house in Springs, Long Island, that Ian had rented for years and they were soon to buy. Here, their friends the landscape gardener Madison Cox and artist Konstantin Kakanias evoked "an abandoned garden" marquee out of Cocteau's La Belle et la Bete with mossy candelabra and tablecloths hand-painted with the plans for imagined baroque gardens. "It was magic," Carolina remembers. It was also the beginning of an aesthetic adventure for her. "I was always very, very French in my taste," she recalls. "When I first met Ian, I didn't understand English taste at all. I made him sell all of his divine seventeenth-century paintings and all of his lovely furniture-I was so horrified by anything English. It wasn't in my decorative-arts vocabulary, and the French aesthetic is very, very strong; they just don't mix."

Having discovered her husband's house whitewashed and filled with wicker, she set about transforming it into what Vogue described as "a luminous gilded hut" with walls painted "imperial" tones of reds, yellows, and blues (and hand-stenciled by Carolina herself-with a toothbrush). After the initial purge, however, her decorating vision underwent a sea change as an English sensibility crept in "more and more." Her husband's British friends (notably decorator Peter Dunham and jeweler Charlotte di Carcaci) helped her to "discover all of that magical period of English decor-Elizabethan, Charles I, Charles II, William and Mary-and it taught me something that was softer and more relaxed, a mixture of styles."