A classicist with a knack for creating historically based, preservation-minded interiors with a contemporized perspective, Jayne (with project manager Marissa Stokes) seemed an obvious choice for the restoration of a landmark Palm Beach, Florida, villa. Known as Vita Serena, the 1920s Mediterranean Revival home, originally designed by architect Marion Sims Wyeth, poses tidily below prodigious palms on Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway. “It feels like Venice,” Jayne says. “The changing light is very dynamic. It’s beguiling and has a magic to it.” “The architecture of this home is so rich,” Jayne says. “What we did with decoration simply supports the architecture and the art. We furnished and decorated it with an eye to quality and sculpture. It’s arranged for comfort, but there’s a chastity to it.” Jayne juxtaposed a streamlined steel-base table with a sakhua wood top against moody, textured walls in the dining room. Polished limestone floors reflect light, accentuating a painted timber ceiling that Jayne conserved. A scrolled 20th-century Italian console and vintage forged-iron-and-leather chairs inject sculptural allure. Glimmers of sapphire blue and bronze offer subtle radiance to a seemingly neutral palette. Consider it chromatic subterfuge for clients who shun much color. Scrollwork acts as a curvaceous foil to clean-lined Jean-Michel Frank-style sofas. Furnishings remain elegantly nuanced. A Chinese lamp sits atop a Georgian writing desk, both mingling easily with a modernist sofa. A photograph by Candida Höfer holds its own against the dappled vistas just outside the windows, offering an equally enticing view. Decorative architecture was streamlined to let the textures and furnishings speak for themselves, creating a cocoonlike, discreet room that harks to days when intimate spaces were championed by decorators such as Edith Wharton, a Jayne muse. (In fact, he wrote 2018’s Classical Principles for Modern Design as a revisitation, through today’s lens, of Wharton and Ogden Codman Jr.’s 1897 The Decoration of Houses.) A hemp wallcovering from Donghia, Cowtan & Tout fabric on the sofa, and pillows from Jim Thompson play to a surreptitious color scheme.
