Pamela Babey

Pamela Babey admits she could never handle the distraction of her own house in the country. The Brooklyn-born designer nevertheless creates the most civilized of such distractions for her clients. More often, though, she demonstrates the authority of her restraint on commissions vast in scale, including decidedly posh hotels and corporate headquarters worldwide. With ongoing projects in India, Uruguay, Sydney, and Seoul, Ms. Babey seems to cross oceans as often as many New Yorkers cross town.

For all her travels abroad, the peripatetic designer proclaims her love of gardening, a hobby she gleaned from what she describes as "an unusual outdoor upbringing near the Botanical Gardens and the Brooklyn Zoo," In 1950 her family moved to New Mexico, where Ms. Babey cultivated an interest in American Indian and Mexican artifacts through frequent visits to Mexico City and archeological digs. She decided on a career at an early age: "Imagine how crushed I was in fifth grade when Mr. Bissell said I most definitely could not be a civil engineer, as that was not something a girl could do," Ms. Babey recalls. "I went home disappointed to Mom, who wisely asked, 'Doesn't architecture sound more enjoyable?'"

Ms. Babey answered her mother's question in 1968, when she completed a Bachelor of Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley. Next she moved to New York to work for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and James Stewart Polshek & Partners, and then returned to California to spend most of the 1980's at the office of Charles Pfister in San Francisco. In 1991 Ms. Babey co-founded the San Francisco-based firm Babey-Moulton, of which she is a principal and president.

Ms. Babey's transformation of a 15th century monastery into the sumptuous Four Seasons Milano hotel represents her guiding principle: "Old is old, new is new, and there should be no mistaking of the two," she declares. "Traditional furniture or antique reproductions were not considered for the hotel, nor was the postmodern-Italian thing going on. I like classics, not weird objects."

It's not surprising that Ms. Babey's personal reading list similarly embraces what many would call the classics. "I read the usual biographies," Ms. Babey reveals. "Cecil Beaton, Sitwells, Horst, Elsie deWolfe, Billy Baldwin. Leads me to believe I may have arrived at the wrong time."