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But the biggest maintenance job is keeping all his thriving plants from getting too big and overwhelming other aspects of the garden, such as the huge stones he carefully chose as accents or the pergola with its hanging, removable wall panels and Chinese Chippendale design.

He enjoys his success, his growing popularity in the local business world, his lunches at the Zenith Athletic Club, whose lobby “was Gothic, the washroom Roman Imperial, the lounge Spanish Mission and the reading-room Chinese Chippendale.”

In the realm of custom bunk rooms, “there’s always an element of whimsy,” said Kara Miller, an interior designer based in Jupiter, Fla., who has trimmed bunk beds in diagonal filigree based on Chinese Chippendale precedents.

In décors, she has been equally exacting; she spent twenty years searching for some eighteenth-century Chinese Chippendale wall paper of which she originally possessed a fragment.

The focal point is a large fireplace featuring exotic Chinese Chippendale motifs and trimmed with hand-carved dogwood blossoms.