Scale is extremely important in the home: A big mistake people make is with proportions. They don’t realize that if you put a canopy bed in a small room, it will make the room feel gigantic.  Small rooms take big things, and in big rooms, you can’t put small things – they look really dinky.

Use Color: I love color. Blue, white and yellow is my favorite color combination.

Think of comfort when arranging your furniture: Your guests must be comfortable.  Look at your furniture the day after a party and see how your friends have pulled things around to create conversation groupings, then rearrange it like that.

I love Fresh Flowers: White tulips are my favorite, and I like big green plants in the house.

Wrinkled clothes make your skin look less wrinkled! I think about patterns and fabrics, but I don’t think much about what I wear. I don’t really like to get dressed. I mean, I’m not a nudist, but I don’t like to get dressed.

A perfect host leaves you alone. She sleeps in her guest room a couple of nights prior to when her guests come, to make sure everything is comfortable. Rooms have to be tested to make sure everything is there.

When you are arranging things, you want it to look natural, like the things were always there and it didn’t just happen on purpose. What I choose to put on a client’s bedside table is always very personal, but a vase comes into mind, and you have to think whether it should have 1 flower, 3 flowers, 5 flowers etc. Tables should always have a lamp and 5 other items, so it’s not too even.

Don’t be too serious about what you collect. One of my favorite things is a clock with a monkey’s face on it that I have on my bedside table. I also love to collect bird and dog paintings and porcelains. I have so many paintings and porcelains and all that silly stuff, I have too much stuff! It is time for a deaccession.

“This is the first room – a decorator’s show house in Greenwich, Connecticut – I ever had published; it was in the September 1969 issue of House and Garden. I used a lot of my own furniture in the space, including a sofa that I had slip covered and a French screen in the corner.”

Image from Architectural Digest

“Mario’s living room, designed as the original house’s library, is glazed in three shades of lime green and creamy white, with a faux-sisal painted floor. Over the sofa hangs Mario’s collection of dog paintings. He often jokes, “These paintings are my ancestors. Seriously, I love dogs.” To the left of the sofa is a blue and white French screen, which he would hide behind to overhear prospective clients’ first impressions.”

Image from Architectural Digest

“The master bedroom is a blush color with an even paler pink-ground Lee Jofa chintz used on the four poster bed. On the slipper chair is a pale turquoise lily block print from Jean Monro. Mario remarks, “I love the idea of mixing several patterns. It’s like a garden with different flowers and plants – suddenly you see a lot of this and then a lot of that. It grows over time.”

Image from Architectural Digest

It was this iconic bedroom created for the 1984 Kips Bay Show House that earned Mario the moniker “The Prince of Chintz” from news reporter Chauncey Howell. House Beautiful Editor Margaret Kennedy, who devoted the cover and seven pages to the room in the magazine, says, “If a particular room at a particular moment can define an era, this was it… The genius of the room was that in the midst of muchness, the airiness of the white bed calmed it down, as did the pale lavender walls, which receded. At the height of America’s obsession with English country style, Mario’s interpretation was the best.”

Image from Architectural Digest

“Watermelon walls were hand painted by artists Robert Jackson and Haleh Atabeigi to resemble eighteenth-century Chinese wallpaper in the dining room. A pale blue ceiling suggests the sky. The outdoor garden setting is complemented with the flowering-treillage carpet, the only floor covering in the main rooms.

Image from Architectural Digest

All quotes taken from Mario Buatta Fifty years of American interior Decoration, Published by Rizzoli and out now.

“That nickname was given to me by Chauncey Howell,” he tells us over tea, having popped in to visit me with my mother and sister before racing off to a Macy’s cocktail. “He was on Live at Five at NBC News every day, and he came to the show house I’d worked on at Kip’s Bay in the 1970’s. I did this blue and white bedroom, which was way over the top. Chauncey interviewed all the decorators including me, and said, “Chintz, wince, mince, wince, prince, Prince of Chintz!” And that’s how it happened!”

Born in Staten Island, Buatta had a chequered start to his career, staring off with a brief stint at the Cooper Union studying architecture. “My grandfather built private houses and thought I would be the next architect. I lasted 9 weeks. I hated it and left and got a job at Altman’s the department store, in the decorating department. And then I went from there to Europe with Parsons School, came back a year later, and worked for Elisabeth Draper, then for Keith Irvine.” A product of his own hard graft, Buatta forged his own way, starting his own business after being fired by Irvine. “So it’s been hard work. I don’t believe in school, I mean I’m self-taught. I’ve always trained my eye, ever since I was a little boy. I knew what I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. At the back of Ruth Lynford’s book, she wrote, “From the day I was 5 years old, I knew I wanted to be a decorator.” And I was the same.”

Rather than school, Buatta’s major influence was in fact his Aunt Mary, who introduced him to print, color and the joys of a slightly over the top approach. “I was fascinated with my Aunt’s house. Everything she did always had to be bigger and better than everyone else. I learnt a lot from her. If House & Garden said Mediterranean was in for the season, she would have a Mediterranean room. And then the next time, it would be Italian, and she would have an Italian room.  I used to like to spend all my time at my Aunt’s house with the chintz. She would have summer chintz, and winter chintz.”

Her approach as well as that of other designers he admired like Nancy Lancaster and John Fowler all served to help form his now unmistakable aesthetic. Best described as English Country glamour, it’s a look that is always dripping in print and luxury, yet manages to remain natural and un-styled (‘undecorated, as he likes to put it,) with a wink towards excess, too. Today, five decades after starting out in the business, Buatta is still on top form as he publishes – finally – his first ever book, a four hundred page tome called Mario Buatta: Five Decades of American Interior Decoration. His self styled ‘Buattapedia,’ it shows the full glory of the Prince of Chintz’s reign. “Everyone has always laughed at it, they think its silly,” he says of his name and the reputation that it carries. “But I’m still the Prince!” Well quite!

Read our next post coming soon on Mario Buatta’s Top Tips for Decorating, Entertaining and Generally Being Chic…

Mario Buatta: Five Years of American Interior Decoration is out now

http://www.amazon.com/Mario-Buatta-American-Interior-Decoration/dp/0847840727