Elliot apartment

Planting the English countryside in New York

April 3, 2000
Web posted at: 11:24 a.m. EDT (1524 GMT)

NEW YORK (CNN) -- The big city may be outside, but that doesn't bother interior designer Mary Elliot. Her apartment is decorated as if it were the English countryside, blooming and beautiful.

"(I) love flowers," she says. "Everything with flowers -- if it's got a flower on it, I like it."

Elliot's bedroom, with floral prints on the drapes and bed, is colorful proof. The entry's walls boast a series of botanical designs and flower prints, too.

The dining room, Elliot says, is virtually a garden room.

"Well, it overlooks the garden, and I fill it with flowers as often as possible," she says. "When the trees are out in the spring it's beautiful, and in the summer and you can open all the shades and you'll hear the birds in the trees and the children and it really does feel like a garden."

Elliot says she tried an array of styles in her home before deciding to bring the English countryside indoors.

"I went from early American with pine floors and white slip covers to quilts to sort of modern," she says. "And then I decided one night to move everything I owned into the living room, and it started to look like an English countryside house."

Her home felt as good as it looked, says Elliot, who thinks her redesigned apartment is casually elegant.

"It looks like children and dogs could be playing," she says. "Things are a bit out of place. They could not be quite plum or perfect. I like that. ... There's always the sort of a feeling you could walk in and be terribly relaxed."

"I come home and I cannot believe I'm in New York City. Everyone that comes here wants to stay because it's so quiet."
— Mary Elliot, Interior Designer

Elliot says she noted a few guidelines when designing her English country kitchen:

"I think it has to look like people could cook in it, and people have (to have) a place to sit," she says. "They seem to always have ... colors in kitchen, and it seems to need a pine table of some type, of which I have a small pine table that works.

"I have some baskets on the wall," says Elliot. "I have some more blue and white (china), and I have a collection of copper. Some of it is old, some of it's new, and I hung it on a rack."

The best feature of her apartment? Elliot says it's a retreat from urban life.

"I come home and I cannot believe I'm in New York City," she says. "Everyone that comes here wants to stay because it's so quiet and the whole neighborhood is like a lovely park."

CNN Style Correspondent Elsa Klensch contributed to this report.

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