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Country comforts

Roger and Gayle Mandle's farmhouse is a place for making art and enjoying family.

The expansive gray farmhouse sits like a rambling sculpture in a sea of green, punctuating the New England countryside. And before the green meets the blue sky beyond, the Slocums River moves across this landscape like a glistening thread, disappearing into the open ocean 2 miles away.

For Gayle and Roger Mandle, this southeastern Massachusetts haven is a place of peace. They come year-round for rest and creative recharging (she paints, he does photography), and family members join them during the summer.

In 1997, they were hunting for a second home not too far from Providence, where Roger serves as president of the Rhode Island School of Design, when a grocery-store flier led them to the 1840 farmhouse, says Gayle. (At RISD, they live in a more formal home, the school's 21-room president's house.)

"We always buy old houses, fix them up, and then seem to sell them at the worst time!" says Gayle Mandle. "But we see ourselves staying here until we retire." The open views the family enjoys come from the efforts of a local trust group that formed to purchase land parcels, staving off development. "It could have been back-to-back houses, but we seem to be fairly protected now," Mandle says.

An interior designer and artist for many years, Mandle took on the renovation of the farmhouse, with some help from family members. Her son Luke, a San Francisco architect, eliminated a staircase in the living room, added a chimney so a fireplace was usable, and built a dormer to accommodate his mother's studio. Out back, he built a playhouse for the Mandles' grandchildren, complete with picture window. Her daughter Julia, a professional dancer in Manhattan, helped her create a distinctively painted kitchen floor.

The result is a home that harmonizes interior design with the outdoor views of each room, creating a seamless canvas from inside to outside. In many rooms, she chose to paint the walls with arresting colors - from lemon yellow to sunset orange to the purest of whites. And each room has a subtle, simply stated design theme that juxtaposes her own art with collections, antiques, and flea market treasures.

For example, in the lemon-yellow front hall, farm implements such as an English peat shovel and a hay fork hang on the walls, leading the eye upstairs. "I like the vernacular of the farmhouse," Mandle says.

The informal dining room, just off the kitchen, glows warmly amid sunset orange walls - achieved with a mixture of yellow and orange paints plus a layer of white sponged onto the colors. The white painted farm table, circled by a mismatched collection of white and mint-green chairs, maintains the casual mood. An old green cabinet and a green painted highchair extend the theme, and there's cushy seating in rattan and wicker chairs with snowy white cushions. The table holds fresh flowers and two little wooden pigs.

In the living room, "I wanted a simple and cool look," Mandle says. So she painted the floors, ceilings, and walls bright white and arranged an assortment of white seating pieces - simple, square couches, wingbacks, boxy reading chairs - atop sisal rugs. A desk made from an old door atop a wooden box was painted and distressed; the art behind the desk, The Big Blue Man, is a granddaughter's handiwork.

In the formal dining room, the walls are a dark sand, and the focal point of the room is a massive 19th-century Eastlake-style cupboard. The tabletop is bright white on a dark wood base, picking up on the white trim and ceiling. Another large painting sits on the back wall - one of Mandle's many contemporary collages in the house. "I'm a gluer and ripper," she says of her style.

The kitchen is a small, functional room where a long stainless steel table with an open bottom holds dishes and platters and functions as a work space. There are no fancy appliances or high-tech gadgets, just a cozy little breakfast table for two with a sunny yellow-checked tablecloth. The most interesting aspect of the room is the floor, which was finished by painting the dark wood white and dragging a comb through the wet paint, creating a pattern of thick and thin wavy white lines.

On the second level are the master bedroom - a serene room where pale yellow and country floral fabric rules - and guest bedrooms with crisp white floors and walls as a backdrop for colorful art, bed linens, and throw rugs. A bright orange staircase leads the way to Mandle's art studio on the third floor; it's the perfect place to work or - with its endless views of the countryside - to not work.