Holly Hunt bags the best and showcases it in her business and home.(Chicago Tribune)

CHICAGO _``It's nicely done but it doesn't look like me yet," says Holly Hunt, kicking off her shoes at the front door and walking across the oak hardwood floors in gray socks.

"I love the place I'm in," she says of the 4,200-square-foot home she moved into four years ago. "I love this apartment, the openness and its airiness, but I feel like I'm always apologizing for it," says Hunt, whose eye and home furnishings business have earned her respect around the world and whose work has been regularly featured in all of the major shelter publications. "I'm still customizing it to myself."

Hunt, the driving force behind two namesake showrooms in The Merchandise Mart in Chicago and four others in New York, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis and Miami, moved to this East Lake Shore Drive apartment four years ago from a home in Winnetka, Ill. She sold the Tudor-style home, which was almost twice as large, furnished. She chose to bring only a few things, such as a writing desk and a chair from the Rose Tarlow/Melrose House Collection, one of the furniture lines she represents. "I wanted to start over and to start fresh," she says. "I moved in with a few things and started to build on that."

Hunt's work-in-progress, by her estimation, is a few style beats short of being the home that best reflects her.

She sees where art needs to be hung, adjusts a tilted painting, notices pin-size holes in the wall from where a previous painting hung, and talks about different pieces that could be moved somewhere else.

A stuffed panda bear with a baby panda strapped to its back stands out in the living room where there are pre-Columbian pottery on the fireplace mantel, Robert Rauschenberg paintings and Robert Motherwell elegy art on the wall.

Hunt, who is no-frills in dress and attitude, preferring the clean softly tailored lines of a Jil Sander suit, doesn't appear to be the stuffed toy type. "I'm not," she affirms.