Canterbury Tales

When interior designers first toured Canterbury Manor, they knew this would be no ordinary fixer-upper.

The 22 members of the American Society of Interior Designers/Orange County Chapter faced challenges on a grand scale with the English Tudor estate in Coto de Caza chosen for the 1996 Philharmonic House of Design.

The 12,560-square-feet manor and its 1,600-square-feet guest house is the largest project the society has undertaken in six years. The members volunteered their time and expertise, then opened the house up to public tours to benefit the Philharmonic Society of Orange County’s music education programs for schoolchildren.

To complicate matters, not all of the existing finishes suited the designers’ tastes.

“Each room had a real story,” said Carmen Olsson, ASID chairwoman. “The architecture was wonderful, but some of the finishes and the flooring--you had to ask, ‘Why?’ ”

Visitors who tour the manor Tuesdays through Sundays through May 19 won’t be asking that question, thanks to the designers’ ingenuity. They gave each room a complete make-over, using paint, finishes, flooring and furnishings.

To keep the 2-year-old manor, which is on the market for about $5 million, from becoming a cacophony of competing tastes, the designers worked from the same color palette: ivory, moss green, jonquil, raspberry, cornflower and butter cream.

They ripped out or camouflaged most finishes and fixtures that did not fit the scheme--or the English Tudor decor, an architecture popular in 15th and 16th century England and characterized by rounded arches, molding and paneling.

In the massive drawing room--with its 33-feet-high ceiling--designer Sheldon Harte of Newport Beach had to figure out a way to keep the marble fireplace and high, wood-paneled walls from dwarfing the furnishings.

“The scale of the room was very challenging,” Harte said. “Normal furniture looked like dollhouse furniture.”

He pulled out the existing sofas and used an eclectic combination of overscaled, overstuffed upholstered couches, chairs and pillows.

“If everything matches, it’s unapproachable,” he said.

To compete with the room’s dark wood paneling, Harte chose a mix of upholstery fabrics in saturated hues, including a saffron floral fabric on the large couch and easy chairs, a striped raspberry, cream and blue velvet brocade on an antique chair, and a leopard print on a pillow and seat cushion.

The great room--which is 35 feet by 45 feet and has white walls, towering leaded windows and high ceilings--had the opposite problem of the drawing room. Designer Hank Morgan of Newport Beach found it a little too bright.

“I wanted to tone it down,” he said.

He did so by softening the walls with a pale shade of tan paint that matched a rose-print fabric he used for the 15-foot-tall curtains and the 8 1/2-foot chaises. Like Morgan, he also chose large-scale furnishings in proportion to the room’s size.

Wendi Young, an interior designer from Aliso Viejo, faced a different set of challenges in a small powder room. She found the existing cabinetry did not match the home’s English Tudor architecture, so she had the entire works yanked out and simpler, more streamlined white cabinets installed.

“The original was heavily carved. It was more Spanish than English,” Young said. “I looked at 18th century English homes, and [the furnishings] were much more simple. They had clean lines.”

Young even replaced the mauve-colored toilet with a white one. All that remained of the original interior were the 18-karat gold sink and faucet.

“It’s kind of hard to toss an 18-karat gold sink. And everything else was so simple, the sink acted like a little piece of jewelry,” Young said.

In the dining room, designer Lynda Pratt Notaro of Mission Viejo was blessed with a wonderful coffered ceiling dotted with carved pineapple, but the terra-cotta marble fireplace didn’t match the color scheme. She solved the problem by choosing a floral wallpaper that blended the raspberry and warm terra-cotta hues.

Steve Stein, a Laguna Niguel designer, transformed what had been a pink little girl’s bedroom into an airy, ivory-hued young woman’s retreat and bath. The walls of the bath were covered in a torn parchment with painted gold accents, and the pink carpet on the bedroom floor was replaced with parchment-colored sisal, a woven wool.

Stein furnished the retreat with a simple, aged pewter canopy bed with an ivory-colored cotton damask spread and plaid celedon pillows.

Teresa Scotti, the Anaheim designer in charge of the master bath, inherited gray and raspberry marble tiles and raspberry-colored fixtures. To avoid competing with such strong color, she stenciled the walls in a tone-on-tone ivory paint.

Interior designers estimate that for the three-bedroom, six-bathroom house, they installed more than $300,000 in improvements. After the tour, the furniture will be removed, but the wall and window treatments, as well as flooring, cabinetry, fixtures and other permanent finishes, will remain.

One need not be an English lord to use some of the designers’ techniques in a more modest abode.

Any home decorator can mix upholstery patterns to keep a room from looking too contrived, as Harte did in the drawing room (hint: Stay within the color theme).

To lighten a room that has dark wood built-in bookcases or shelving, homeowners can do what Stein did in the young woman’s retreat and what Newport Beach designer John Benecke did in the library: Cover the backs of the shelves in a lighter fabric.

To add height to a room, try experimenting with wallpaper. Designer Randy Boyd of Laguna Beach made the closet of the young man’s bedroom appear taller by covering the walls with fleur-de-lis wallpaper with a crested border that ended about 18 inches short of the ceiling.

To draw the eye upward, the uncovered portion of the walls and ceiling were painted a lighter, contrasting hue.

“Many people don’t realize you can stop wallpaper where you want to,” Olsson said.

Using antiques, as the designers did throughout, is an effective way to keep a redecorating job from looking like one.

“A lot of homeowners have valuable possessions, but they don’t realize what they have because they’ve had them so long,” Olsson said. “Often clients will say, ‘Nothing is sacred,’ but I’ll walk into their homes and say, ‘That’s staying.’ ”

Of course, it takes money, talent or both to duplicate some of Canterbury’s finer interior design features.

The 18th century Oriental rug in the drawing room, the Monet-style scenes of the English countryside painted in niches in the hallway, the whimsical floral motif painted on the ceiling of the Garden Room are precious, one-of-a-kind installations that are much easier to come by if one is to the manor born.

Visitors can take self-guided tours of the estate and its six-acre grounds for $17 a person ($12 each for groups of 20 or more). Tickets and information: (714) 840-7542.