FINALLY, HOME

With signature élan, Aerin Lauder makes a classic Palm Beach manse her very own

- MITCHELL OWENS

Two separate interviews, two different days, a single word repeated: magical. That's the term that Aerin Lauder, the designer, uses to describe her new getaway in Palm Beach, which she just moved into a couple of months ago. It's also the word that the AD100 interior designer Stephen Sills, a longtime friend who handled the decors in collaboration with Lauder, uses to describe the project in general. "It's an intelligent house," he explains. "A pretty house with a beautiful layout, a romantic history, and lovely gardens, like an enchanting French pavilion."

Lauder, whose parents live across the street"close, but not too close," she jokes-had been captivated by the place since she was a child, ultimately dreaming of the life that she and her husband, financier Eric Zinterhofer, could create there. Until then, though, the couple raised their two sons, Will and Jack, in Manhattan, spending time, among other residences, at her family's Palm Beach mansion, which had belonged to her cosmetics queen grandmother Estée Lauder.

But a couple of years ago, Lauder's dream house, designed in 1930 by architect Howard Major in the Louis XVI style and faced with picturesquely pitted Cuban limestone, came on the market, and she snapped it up. "I've never had my own home in Palm Beach," she says.