By Annie Kellie with photography by Tim Street-Porter

In her newest book, veteran design author Annie Kelly takes readers to the verdant countryside of Litchfield, Connecticut, for an inside look at some of the historic town's most carefully kept and restored homes. The book is a joint venture between Kelly and her husband, photographer Tim Street-Porter (both editors of and contributors to The Home Observer) who photographed the elegant interiors and gardens that distinguish these classic country homes. Kelly and Street-Porter own a house in Litchfield themselves, and after leafing through their book, replete with images of pristine, gabled houses, sun-drenched rooms, and lush foliage, it is easy to see how they fell in love with the aesthetic of the town.

Kelly spotlights eleven eighteenth- and nineteenth-century homes owned by well-known decorators and design aficionados, including Bunny Williams, Robert Couturier and artist Norman Sunshine. While her words provide context for the homes featured, she also allows Street-Porter's exquisite photographs to speak for themselves. Each home is carefully documented to illustrate the architecture and layout of the rooms while also drawing our eye to the understated details  –   a porcelain rose page- holder, a silver-tipped cane resting in an umbrella stand  –  that capture the character of a home.

Litchfield Style is, like the homes that it celebrates, a perfect blend of sophistication and charm that will provide inspiration for any homemaker looking for ideas to imbue their home with a little country-classic style.

SLIDESHOW: Fishs Eddy at home.

Serendipity: luck, or good fortune, in finding something good accidentally.

"After I graduated college in 1984, with a not-so-useful art degree," recalls Julie Gaines, "I moved into a small walk-up building on West 15th Street. The landlord gave me a break on the rent to sweep the floors and maintain the hallways. I was making small, folksy paintings to sell on the street, but other than that I was pretty lost. The Wooden Indian (a shop that sold vintage stuff) was only a few doors away from my home. The young man behind the counter, who was wrapping up my purchase of drinking glasses (who was working there because he was also pretty lost–he had dropped out of high school), quietly asked me to a movie."

Ms. Gaines, now 47, married the young man, David Lenovitz, now 51, about two years after that movie date. A year before the wedding, they opened a small store together and called it Fishs Eddy. The rest is history, serendipity even.

"In those days you could snag a lease even if you didn't have money," Ms. Gaines says of the days before Union Square was home to a Best Buy and a Nordstrom's Rack. The couple scrounged together $3,000, which got their foot in the door on a store on East 17th Street near Gramercy Park. They stocked the place with "junk from our mothers' homes-my mother even unloaded some of her wedding gifts that by then were vintage," loot from hours of dumpster diving and salvaged throwaways from garbage piles left outside other peoples' stores (one shopkeeper's garbage is another shopkeeper's treasure, or merchandise). Ms. Gaines said they were also aggressive about calling places like the 21 Club and the Plaza Hotel offering to pay for and cart away whatever old tableware was idling in storage spaces. Their vision never wavered, and over the past 25 years, the vintage dishware and kitchen accouterments they sold have become highly sought after by all sorts of New Yorkers, including Julian Schnabel who, according to Ms. Gaines and Mr. Lenovitz, not only bought plates but smashed them to pieces to glue onto his well-known paintings.

At one point occupying five retail locations, the store currently stands as a single emporium on Broadway and 19th Street, where Ms. Gaines aand Mr. Lenovitz also offer newly made merchandise they design and manufacture in similar style and comparable quality to their vintage wares.

The walk-up apartment on 15th Street is long gone. For the past dozen or so years Ms. Gaines and Mr. Lenovitz have lived with their two now teenage children in a three-bedroom duplex on the top floor of a riverfront high-rise in Battery Park City (Ms. Gaines does not sweep the hallways here). The apartment, which has a splendid panorama of the Hudson and an unobstructed view of Ellis Island, might be referred to as cookie-cutter in style, except that Ms. Gaines and Mr. Lenovitz have transformed it into a highly personal and idiosyncratic space that could just as well be in a Victorian mansion or a turn-of-the-century brownstone. The interior is true to their personal, very quirky aesthetic. "I hate a 'decorated' space'," said Ms. Gaines blithely, while giving a tour of her home and attempting to tidy up along the way. "I'm rebelling," she said, adding that she grew up across the river on Staten Island, where her relatives were the only Jews in the neighborhood amid Gambinos and Bonnanos. "My mother's home was highly decorated in 'Staten Island Provincial.' Everything had a place. Her home didn't evolve like ours has. I love things with a history, and I hate new."

Ms. Gaines describes their home décor as "authentic, eclectic and curated." In fact at first one hardly notices furniture. Rather, eyes are instantly drawn to the walls that are covered from floor to ceiling with a massive collection of "thrift shop paintings." The couple's collection of about 1,200 paintings includes 800 nudes that Mr. Lenovitz recently bought from an unknown artist in Philadelphia (those are in a gigantic warehouse due to lack of space at home). Ms. Gaines claims the thrift-shop painting genre has become popular and more expensive over the years (although she never paid more that $100 for any one piece, and most were in the $20 range). Every surface in the apartment is home to collections of interesting tchotchkes, also collected over decades. "There's no system in our home," said Ms. Gaines, and even though there is so much diversity in the place, it all hangs together since the "decorators" are true to their aesthetic and never deviate; sleek and modern does not sneak in. Nothing looks out of place here, yet at first glance it appears to be a bit unruly (as does Fishs Eddy, in fact).

"Our house reflects our crazy lifestyle," said Ms. Gaines. "We're scheduling challenged; when the doorbell rings all four of us run to the door hoping there's a food delivery." "We are successful in spite of ourselves. We trust our instincts and ourselves. When we create stuff, it works."

SLIDESHOW: Fishs Eddy at home.

SLIDESHOW: Spring Wares

SLIDESHOW: In the Shops

A bee yard, a Frenchman, a few down-on-their-luck chickens: worlds collide at Blue Spruce Farm, the Water Mill home of Pylones-USA owners Alan Ceppos and Frederic Rambaud. 

SLIDESHOW: The Hamptons, Honey

No, buffalo don't roam here (it is the Hamptons, after all), but a mule does, alongside a few horses with a past and several rescue chickens. But that's a long story.

The house is a Long Island farmhouse, but not the old, quaint variety so familiar and sought-after on the East End. This one, a nondescript '70s build, was purchased in 2001 by its present owners, Alan Ceppos and Frederic Rambaud. The two globe-trotting merchants are the owners of Pylones-USA (the chain of five Manhattan giftware shops where one can buy colorful, whimsical French doodads like cheese graters shaped like the Eiffel Tower) and Tea and Honey (the small store on the Upper East Side where one can buy tea, and honey). Ceppos and Rambaud got their start in the giftware industry 25 years ago as the manufacturers and distributors of the miniature Zen Rock Garden, the one that sat on everyone's desk for decades. But that's another long story.

There are many long stories at Blue Spruce Farm, a 15-acre property with two barns, a 3,500-square-foot farmhouse, and a bee yard with six hives that are part of a larger apiary. The stories all began years ago, when the two urbanites were searching for a quiet place to hole up in on weekends. They had three requirements: "It had to be within two-hours drive of Manhattan, near water, and gay-friendly," Mr. Ceppos said. They found what they were looking for in Water Mill, a quiet village a few miles east of Southampton.

The couple, partners for 38 years, met in Paris in 1973 but came from backgrounds worlds apart. For Mr. Rambaud, a Frenchman  born and raised in Dakar, Senegal, the hills and fields north of Montauk Highway are reminiscent of his childhood home in West Africa, minus wild gazelles. "When I look out at the pasture in front of the house, I see the savannah with herds of deer," he said.

For Mr. Ceppos-who was raised in Bayside, Queens-the wide, sandy beaches of the Hamptons are a reminder of his childhood summers in Rockaway and Long Beach, minus the boardwalk.

The men have created a life and a home that is a mélange of their disparate backgrounds, an interior décor one-half French-African, one-half Jewish-American: matzoh ball soup with sauce-piquant.

No professional designer worked on the interior of the house, and no design dictates or formulas were followed-but every inch of the house is decorated. Both men contributed ideas and objects from their own travels and families. The result reflects their personalities rather than rules. "I might not have picked some of the things Alan inherited from his grandparents, but it is his legacy and it had to work," Mr. Rambaud said. "As our style is eclectic, it wasn't a problem. It might have been a problem had it been minimalist or Louis XV or Buatta-esque." He added, "If there is one thing that Alan doesn't question about me, it is my taste. I pick, I place, I change, I archive. So we never had a decorating fight."

Living with another person's belongings is not always easy. At Blue Spruce Farm, an eyebrow may rise once in a while, though fights do not. One of Mr. Rambaud's collections is not one that Mr. Ceppos would have chosen, Mr. Ceppos said. A stash of animal skulls collected from the property, an Australian crocodile head and a cow skull from Bhutan, are kept on the wide front porch next to the front door.  "It's part of my 21st-century Victorian curiosity cabinet," Mr. Rambaud said.

The property is at its heart a farm and "bio-dynamic," according to its owners, who maintain the land according to the spiritual and scientific gardening principles set out by Dr. Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s. "There hasn't been one ounce of chemicals, fertilizer or herbicides used on the property since we bought it," Mr. Ceppos said. The 200-square-foot vegetable garden feeds them all summer; eggs from their Rhode Island Red chickens (the ones the men rescued from a certain fate as McNuggets) supply breakfast year round; and honey from the hives is extracted and bottled to be sold locally. Their venture, the Hamptons Honey Company, bottles honey from other sources and sells it online and in stores.

The solar-heated swimming pool was purposely set to the side of the house, hidden from view from the back deck where the men entertain all summer and sit in the winter catching whatever rays sneak through. ("We didn't want to look out at a covered pool all winter," Mr. Ceppos said.) Large stone boulders separating the pool area from the rest of the backyard create a distinct outdoor room.The boulders, placed with precision, are reminiscent of a Zen rock garden, a large version of the miniature ones the two men produce and market. Each boulder was chosen for its size and shape and brought onto the land from a local stone yard.

The grasses surrounding the pool, though carefully planted, are wild-looking and create an un-manicured effect. Here at Blue Spruce Farm, the landscaping, too, eludes easy categories. "Our garden is neither French nor English," Mr. Ceppos said. "It's supposed to look natural."