Providence stepped in when I became the founding editor of Domino magazine. I had worked in different media jobs—photography editor, garden writer, etc. Somehow, in 2004, I managed to persuade the powers at Condé Nast to let me create the magazine I felt I—and others who might also have been the product of women’s-libbing mothers who didn’t bother about the domestic arts, as well as younger women, confident about fashion but lacking the tools to translate their sensibility into a home—needed. My motivation in pitching a practical magazine about the decoration of houses was in part selfish—to gather people whose style I admired and learn from them.

My boss at the time, James Truman, suggested I meet Rita Konig, a brilliant young English style writer and decorator who was moving to New York. Rita grew up at the side of her mother, the English designer Nina Campbell, and early in her career ran Nina’s shop. Her style and way of decorating, however, is uniquely her own and so natural as to seem part of her genetic code. She possesses a delightful sensitivity to rooms and objects, along with a wildly pragmatic domestic streak. (She would make a brilliant housekeeper.) Ever since the evening many winters ago that she wafted into a hotel bar in a delicate cloud of Sisley’s Eau du Soir and we began chatting, I was smitten. Rita has since become one of my closest friends, and also one of the people who have most transformed the quality of my life. That is what a great decorator can do.

There is what you can see in a house when you visit or look at pictures—the furniture and fabric and wall coverings and the like. But there are also decoration’s invisible powers—the way a room works or makes you feel when you are inside it. Rita is a master of both.

In many ways, I am a far from ideal decorating client. I don’t have a substantial budget; my husband, Jacob Weisberg, and I each accumulate things that sometimes don’t go well together; and I rearrange constantly, not always for the better. Even looking at these pictures, I can hear Rita wishing I had styled them differently, removed some (several) offending objects. She is clear and direct about what she thinks, but also open-minded and pleased that I bring my own interestsflowers and gardens and craft—into the house. She has been patient, and we have made changes bit by bit over the years, when time and money would allow, sometimes revisiting and upgrading a room before even tackling another. It’s now been over 15 years of tweaking, and renovating, diving into decorating and retreating from it.

My husband and I bought this modest 18th-century Dutch Colonial house in the Hudson Valley in 1995, so that I could make a garden. The house is a higgledy-piggledy one, having begun its life in the late 1700s as a one-room inn on the old Albany Post Road that ran from New York City to Albany. There were rooms tacked on to it in the 1920s and some later ye olde style modernizations in the 1950s and ’60s. The house had been owned by Dallas Pratt, an heir to the Standard Oil fortune and cofounder of the American Museum in Britain, a decorative arts collection, in Bath, England. It was by far the most modest of his many houses, and perhaps his favorite, although he visited most years only in October, when the weather cooled and the leaves turned. By the time we arrived, the house was an odd mix of some good Early American–period details along with bathrooms outfitted with plastic shower stalls atop shag carpet, sinks built into the bedrooms and enclosed behind paneled doors that looked like a cross between a confessional and a telephone booth, and an attached garage that had been transformed into a dead ringer for the set from The Brady Bunch.

Except for some restoration and a kitchen renovation with the hugely talented architect Jim Joseph (AD, February 2014), who is an expert in old houses, we did very little for nearly a decade other than get on with our lives and enjoy the place and its quirks.Finally, in 2005, we got around to trying to really sort things out with Jim and our friend Dave Merandy, a local carpenter-craftsman who eventually became mayor of the neighboring town while still being a dedicated, aesthetically minded builder. Before Rita came on the scene, we had already decided to move the kitchen into the Brady Bunch room, add a large sitting room giving onto a screened-in porch, and a new primary bedroom above it. Rita began by working through the spaces architecturally with Jim. She finessed the plan to have two guest bedrooms share an enlarged adjoining bathroom for a sense of privacy for visitors, by maintaining a shared tiny hallway and keeping the bath and toilet in separate rooms on either side of it. In the sitting room we were building, she found an old fireplace mantel compatible with the wall molding Jim designed, making the room feel as if it had been there all along. The windows in that room had to be set back rather deeply from the wall, and so she suggested old mirror paneling angled alongside them to throw the lost light back into the room. And in an awkward leftover space between the kitchen and sitting room, she devised a flower-arranging room for me, reusing an old soapstone sink that Dave had found at an antiques fair for the original kitchen remodel.

The downside of this wonderful new renovation was that the house’s original small sitting room was then rarely used. It became a sort of a no-man’s-land, a barely furnished pass-through to the old bedrooms. Eventually, Rita had the idea to make it a cozy winter sitting room, in contrast to the cheery, bright new one that felt so summery. Rita covered the walls in a warm, delicate-patterned wallpaper from Robert Kime and the floor with a striped woven carpet from Tim Page, and painted the trim in a slightly murky putty that drew them peaceably together. Into this, she gathered some of our random unused furniture, which many other decorators would have simply packed off: a nice old George Sherlock sofa, a refugee from our city apartment, that is really too large for the room; a Biedermeier table we bought in Sweden that never fit into our life; and a cheap ottoman left behind from some long-ago photo shoot. She corralled my husband’s Hudson River School paintings and some of our pottery. Adding to this motley mix, she made a few judicious purchases of chairs, lamps, textiles, and cushions, and did some reupholstering, transforming the space into a now much-loved room for us and also a semiprivate sitting room for guests.

For Rita, the pleasure of rooms comes from their comfort, from lighting that is soft but plentiful, from the fragrance of fresh air, fires, flowers, and cooking, and from having everything you might want, like fire starters or drinks, on hand. For Rita there is no armchair without a small table at the perfect height for setting a drink down beside it, or without a light for reading. Rita has made rooms that work, elevating the lives inside them, whether one is working alone, having an intimate chat, or throwing a sprawling party. The making of the house has been a long conversation between us, one that I hope will carry on into the future.

The Advanced Guide To Interior Design with Rita Konig is now available at Create Academy priced at £147 for lifetime access or available as part of its subscription option.

This article originally featured on Architecturaldigest.com