Wake Up and Smell the PALM TREES

In Palm Beach, second homes are the new first homes. For Tommy Hilfiger, Coral House is much more. After 40 years of running a fashion empire, he's shifting gears and staying put for a while.

- MIKE ALBO

To get to Tommy and Dee Ocleppo Hilfiger's newly renovated property in Palm Beach, turn right at Mara-Lago, pass the blinking police lights, then scoot a bit farther on South Ocean Boulevard down Billionaires Row. Behind a gate and across a crunchy white pebble driveway, a shell and tangled coral sculpture carved in coquina stone hangs over the entrance to Coral House. Tommy and Dee, at the door, are in their Saturday casuals, he in a blue shirt and print shorts, she in a Johanna Ortiz print shift dress with tassels. They are barefoot-it's a shoes-off household. Slippers are offered.

Behind them is an atrium with a wide staircase that delivers us to the main living floor in the house, which was once owned by the disgraced media magnate Conrad Black. Not surprisingly, one of America's most successful fashion designers has an exacting eye, including a thing about symmetry. One of Tommy's first decisions was to rip out the winder stairs and install steps that float up to a central hall with a ceiling of pecky cypress, walls waxed and glazed in a limestone color, and bespoke curtains in subdued hues. In the adjoining living room are glass tables with pineapple sculpture bases and English Regency dolphin chairs, both painted gray-white.

Palm Beach isn't really a "before you leave the house, take off one thing" kind of town. If the local style can be subtle, this is it. "You don't walk in and go, 'Oh, coral!' I don't like it when the dress wears the girl," says Cindy Rinfret, the Greenwich and Palm Beach-based interior designer who has worked with Hilfiger on 18 other projects. "Tommy calls this his grand performance."