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"MAKE HISTORY" (Elle Decor, August-September, 2002)

For nearly two years I've been renovating an 18th-century house for myself on eastern Long Island. In the midst of all the sawdust I've been having revolutionary thoughts –in more ways than once.

I grew up in Virginia, where center-hall Colonial-style houses prevail, primly dressed in drab grey-greens and brown-blues. There couldn't be a more wrongheaded palette. Enlightened researchers at the Founding Fathers' houses have proved our ancestors' passion for eye-popping colors like absinthe-green, ruby-red, and cobalt blue that gave a kick to stoic architecture of the time. So have eccentric wallpapers like Pagodas, a late 1700s pattern of hot-pink Chinese temples on a dove-grey ground, now reproduced by a young company in upstate New York called Adelphi Paper Hangings. Sure, it's old-fashioned, but imagine it as the backdrop for tailored white sofas, steel tables, and masses of pink peonies. With "antiques" like these to get you going, why must the word Colonial conjure a weak-tea world of brown reproduction furniture and off-white plaster walls. Thomas Jefferson would not be amused.

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