An indoor-outdoor fireplace serves double duty, creating a cozy glow for a formal patio as well as warming the living room.

Mountains! Water! The more the better.

"I want to live in town," she said. "I'm a city gal."

He wanted a house on a golf course.

"I want a house that's traditional," she said, "not a contemporary tract house."

Still, the realtor hesitated to call Pam and John Baughn about the house she'd found in Seattle's North End, in the Sand Point Country Club community.

The potential was there. It overlooked the golf course, Lake Washington and the Cascade Mountains, and the architecture was 1940s traditional. But previous remodels had left the floor plan confused, and the cramped, old-fashioned kitchen was in a dark, enclosed corner at the back of the house.

"Never mind," the agent wavered, apologizing. "Don't even look at it. I don't think it's what you want."

"We hadn't meant to intimidate her like that," Pam Baughn says. "We just knew what we wanted. And I told her we knew it wasn't going to be easy. So I looked up the house on the Internet and called her right back to make an appointment to go see it."

Baughn was captivated the minute she walked in the door. "It was just so right. It felt perfect. It was fine and livable, and a lot of people would have moved right in."

That was two years ago. The Baughns finally moved in last fall — after stripping the interior, pushing out walls upstairs and down, adding a third garage and opening up already breathtaking views.

The main entry was redesigned to accommodate 60-year-old weeping sequoias that landscapers planted and trained to form a dramatic arch over the walkway.

"We really planned to just do the kitchen and master bedroom," says Baughn, who uses a fine-arts degree from Seattle Pacific University as a part-time interior designer and helps raise funds for Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center.

"But our little project just exploded into a huge, huge, huge thing. It was, 'Well, if we're going to do this, let's also do that.' And finally, it was down to the studs, except for the living room and my office."

The Baughns — he is a partner in the Seattle office of Accenture, a management and technology consulting firm — hired an architect, Patricia Brennan, to help them retain the classic style of the house despite radical changes.

The kitchen is perhaps the most transformed room in the house. The Baughns pushed out walls 6 feet in one direction and 2 in another, gaining an informal dining area and an infusion of light from windows on two sides of the room.

To call the house "traditional" doesn't do justice to the sometimes daring interior design, which Baughn undertook on her own. She's fearless when it comes to color and accents, but her experiments work — even when some of her ideas would seem inconceivably whimsical for a "traditional" house.

For instance, she found something lacking in the large, sand-colored tiles that form a backsplash for the mottled salmon- and charcoal-toned granite countertops in the kitchen. So she added her own embellishment, gluing dozens of miniature tiles in a muted, opalescent rainbow of colors on top of the tile work.

	The Baughns' mantlepiece was carved by cabinet-makers in Canada and shipped here. Care had to be taken to arrange the pewter tiles, from Ann Sacks Tile, because the fireplace opening is odd-sized. "It just wouldn't work to cut the tiles to make them fit because they're puffy," Pam Baughn says.

"I just thought I'd see what I could do with it," she says with an easy shrug.

In the two-story stairway at the front of the house she hung clusters of beads to a graceful, parachute-shaped silk lighting fixture she found in a decorator boutique.

"I liked it, but I thought it needed something else," she says. "Later I went back to the store and told them what I'd done and suggested they might want to do the same thing" to the ones remaining in stock.

Baughn's knack for mixing this and that and coming up with something astonishing and tasteful is evident in the living room, too.

The room is painted a deep moss, dark as a forest primeval. The sofa is a textured, diamond pattern of brown and burnished gold, accented with pillows the color of a fine claret. Across from the sofa, the fireplace is tiled in a similar pattern of pewter blocks from Ann Sacks Tile. For the windows, Baughn sewed panels of beaded gold silk shantung trimmed in the same deep red as the accents.

The mix of gold and pewter, moss and scarlet doesn't clash. Instead it comes off bold and classy.

The other colors Baughn has chosen throughout the house are equally unconventional. Most of the rooms are painted in varying shades of desert camouflage, though the dining room is a rich red, like the living-room accents.

"I'm not afraid to try things," she says. "I'm not afraid to use color because, you know what? If I don't like it, I can paint over it. It's just a couple of hours and a gallon of paint."

The Baughns dedicated as much effort making the outside of the house reflect their taste and their family's needs as the inside. The fireplace reaches from the living room through the outside wall to a patio of concrete that's stamped to look like flagstone. In one corner is a bonsai garden, a miniature mountainscape with dwarf plants and a bubbling fountain.

A small powder room on the first floor is Pam Baughn's favorite part of the house. She bought the marble-topped vanity after seeing it in a home-décor magazine two years ago and used it as the point of interest for the room. "It has such clean lines," she says, "and worked so well with everything else."

Off the kitchen is another patio, this one featuring a sheltered outdoor barbecue with plumbed counter space. To one side is a hot tub; with a tall portable gas heater, it can be used summer and winter.

The Baughns kept as much of the original house's personality as they could, duplicating the unusual exterior with hard-to-find bricks that measure about a foot long by 2 inches wide.

The couple also kept most of the landscaping in the front of the house as it was. "The neighborhood kids called this 'the Dr. Seuss house' because of all the funky trees out front," Pam Baughn says. "They're that twisted kind that look like they came out of Whoville. We didn't want to change that."

And Baughn pulled two cut-glass fixtures from the old master bedroom, took them to a lighting store and learned how to rewire them herself.

"I felt like it was important to keep them," she says. "We were throwing stuff away right and left, and somehow it didn't seem right to just start over with every little thing."

They also kept what drew them to the house in the first place — that triple-whammy view and the gracious, traditional style that reminds Pam of growing up near Seattle's Windermere neighborhood.

"I just never in my wildest dreams thought we'd have everything we asked for," she says.

"Every time I thought about what we were trying to achieve here, I thought, 'Yeah, right.' "

Sally Macdonald is a retired Seattle Times reporter. Benjamin Benschneider is a Pacific Northwest staff photographer.