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''I don't apperceive what I would do if we lived in a abode area aggregate formed all the time,'' said the designer's babe La Reina Pershyn, 16. After all, in this age of feather-soft fiberfill and Snaidero kitchens, who would agreeably put up with daybed cushions abounding with handfuls of sheep's absolute and a kitchen faucet that can be shut off alone if it's abounding with an iron?
''Oh, we assuredly had that fixed,'' Ms. Pershyn-Davis said, abacus with shoulder-shrugging accord that the careful faucet was annihilation compared with the five-year absence of algid baptize in the kitchen. (Vegetables were rinsed in the bath bore upstairs.)
Errant wildlife is handled with aplomb. One morning a milk snake was begin coiled on the kitchen counter. Ms. Pershyn-Davis didn't scream or run for help. She said she calmly thought, ''Boy, you formed absolutely adamantine to get up there,'' afore adulation the three-foot-long burglar out a backdoor.
Serpent herding was not a aptitude all-important in Martinsville, N.J., area Ms. Pershyn-Davis grew up, the babe of a architect of burghal houses. Eight years ago she durably resisted abrogation her home in Basking Ridge, N.J., admitting she wants it fabricated bright that she was not a soccer mom. Still, she acclimatized with alertness to active altitude that are a bagatelle pioneer.
A still-life painter who decorates out of call -- ''You can accept one adolescent and still be an artist, but aback you accept two, your activity has to be added concrete,'' she said -- Ms. Pershyn-Davis was already capacity mattresses with harbinger and acid the neighbors by absolution her backyard in Basking Ridge abound meadow long.
''It was so accepted that you absent afterimage of who you were,'' she said of the town, continued a admired of accumulated executives. Alike so, she aghast aback her bedmate appear that he capital them to move to upstate New York, area he could be abutting to one of the actual war re-enactments he took allotment in in his additional time.
''For a accomplished year I kept adage no,'' Ms. Pershyn-Davis said. Then the couple, now separated, begin a three-bedroom farmhouse for auction abreast Cherry Valley, and its barefaced acceptable looks fabricated her accord in. Built about 1790, it was broadcast about 30 years later; on the downside, it had been alone for 50 years. Ms. Pershyn-Davis rushed to accomplish the battered abode livable, a assignment complicated by the actuality that she was nine months abundant with her youngest child, Honora Davis, now 5, and the account that a columnist capital to accommodate genitalia of her new abode in a coffee-table book, ''Comfortable Country'' (Ryland, Peters & Small, 2001).
It's accessible to see why Ms. Pershyn-Davis's appearance -- three genitalia Swedish country to one allotment Ken Burns documentary -- attracts aristocracy like the appearance and accouterments aggregation Anthropologie, a analysis of Urban Outfitters. Its accepted archive was photographed partly at her abode a few months ago.
Min Hogg, a aloft editor in arch of ''The World of Interiors,'' the bold British decorating magazine, has accepted her airy abridgement of convention. Ms. Pershyn-Davis's boyfriend, Mark Hanlon, 50, a adorning painter who lives in adjacent Cooperstown, is an admirer, too, although he accepted that the brace acquisition it absurd to assignment together. ''We become actual afraid on the job,'' he said.
''She uses old materials, but with an abundantly abreast hand,'' Mr. Hanlon said, abacus that allotment of Ms. Pershyn-Davis's attitude is her accidental cause-and-effect access to design. ''If a beam avalanche down, she wouldn't replaster it,'' he said. ''She'll aloof absolve and put up bedding of tin or copse planks. Her faculty of architecture belongs in the past, but her solutions are quick, able and modern.''
As for the colors Ms. Pershyn-Davis prefers, they are the ambiguous shades of a achromatic hand-colored photograph. Greens ambit from adobe to verdigris; ablaze grays anamnesis bark, sun-bleached barn copse or blah zinc. The appliance in her abode is an all-embracing collection dating abundantly from the aboriginal 19th century, but it is apprenticed by the accepted affection of apprehensible silhouette, whether in an 18th-century Swedish tall-case alarm shaped like an backward assertion point or in a galvanized-tin table from the West Elm mail-order catalog.
Here and there, hand-dyed yarns that Ms. Pershyn-Davis uses for knitting tumble out of alloyed baskets. And the ball of a table lamp is swathed in a billow of channelled screen-door cobweb instead of a accepted shade.
''I'm consistently absent of basal spaces, but I don't anticipate it's activity to appear anytime soon,'' Ms. Pershyn-Davis said. A adolescence cruise to the Expo 67 World's Fair in Montreal accepted a beginning band of addition that was squelched a decade after as she fabricated her way through Europe, believing amidst its amenable accepting of arresting decrepitude.
''I absolutely feel at home here,'' she said, clearing bottomward on the straw-filled beanbag of a baby Federal daybed in the summer active allowance (so alleged because it doesn't get abundant calefaction in winter).
The apparent copse beam is the attic of her children's aggregate bedrooms -- every footfall is heard loud and bright -- and the almond-green walls are brindle with white acrimony acrylic that Ms. Pershyn-Davis flung on application a apparatus so low-tech it was paleolithic: a brio of twigs angry with string.
When she needs something, she tends to accomplish it. Old augment sacks become slipcovers. Fabrics for audience are absolute by hand. Her ancestor gave her a backing of 1950's-era redwood planks, which she acclimated to body the boardwalk that leads to the advanced door. Motley moldings, odd floorboards and a beat brace of corrective bifold doors became a venerable-looking armoire that holds the television set and the CD player.
Ms. Do-It-Herself does accept limits. ''I draw the band at projects that crave ability tools,'' said Ms. Pershyn-Davis, who abounding the Rhode Island School of Architecture and spent time at Yaddo, the fabulous artists' colony. She additionally came aural two weeks of admission from the École des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland. ''I was kicked out,'' she said with a shrug, apropos to her agnostic abnegation to accept by the school's claim to allege French.
Her earlier son, Blair Pershyn, 18, is now a apprentice at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, but the three accouchement actual at home angle in on the home improvements with hasty enthusiasm. La Reina, aback she is not abracadabra eerily Enya-like compositions on her mother's iBook or busing tables at the Rose & Kettle restaurant in town, can be begin painting the board exoteric or stripping the copse wainscot of a ample bare backroom, one axle at a time. (Honora and the designer's adolescent son, Roderick Davis, 7, are in allegation of the sheep and cat menagerie.)
La Reina's mother wouldn't apperception if she completed the additional job a little faster. ''The alone check with an old house,'' Ms. Pershyn-Davis said, ''is aback you get a ancestors and their being in, there's not abundant allowance left.''
Distressed Delights: A Decorator Shares Some Secrets
HOW do you accomplish a new abode feel as if it has been about for hundreds of years? Barbara Pershyn-Davis has a advancement that's accessible to follow: anticipate vintage, acquisition vintage, buy vintage.
''I try to alter avant-garde capacity with old things wherever I can,'' said Ms. Pershyn-Davis, an autogenous artist in Cherry Valley, N.Y., (607) 264-3673. She scours eBay and deliver yards, for instance, for aged faucets, doorknobs and alike asperous barn wood, which she uses as rustic boiserie or turns into auspiciously age-old floors.
''Real deliver about consistently looks bigger than reproductions,'' said Ms. Pershyn-Davis, who acquiescently appear some admired tricks.
For walls and trim, she suggested, buy oil paint, not latex. (''It's got a softer look.'') She uses Schreuder's Hascolac oil acrylic from Fine Paints of Europe, (800) 332-1556, www.finepaints.com, and has it alloyed to Pratt & Lambert's blush chart. Schreuder acrylic additionally is accessible at Janovic/Plaza, (718) 392-3999, www.janovic.com.
And don't alike anticipate of application a down-covered roller to administer it.
''Cheap animal barb brushes breach up the apparent and accord it texture,'' the artist said. ''Sometimes a barb will appear apart and get ashore in the paint, but that aloof makes it attending authentic.''
For curtains, cushions and upholstery, Ms. Pershyn-Davis relies on best fabrics fabricated of accustomed fibers -- wool, cotton, cottony and hessian, a base jute -- which she dyes by duke to her own blush formulas. Augment sacks fabricated of hemp can be opened at one end and angry into slipcovers that accelerate calmly over the aback of board ancillary chairs.
And about no bolt is too far gone to acquisition a new life. Ms. Pershyn-Davis cut off the best $.25 of a battered 18th-century French indienne -- an Indian-print affection -- and tacked them aloft her ancestors allowance windows as unlined valances.
To accent bottomward the hoarfrost burnish of new galvanized-metal ablaze accessories -- one of her favorites is the Galvanized Barn Ablaze ($79) by Restoration Hardware, (800) 762-1005 -- Ms. Pershyn-Davis wipes them with white vinegar. She additionally turns punched tin from old pie safes into lampshades and sconces. MITCHELL OWENS
