Upstate, With Nowhere Left to Hold Back

Designer Rafael de Cárdenas has turned Francesca Bodini's nearly 1,000-acre spread in Dutchess County into a lesson in country-house nerve, letting a room built for ease carry as much wit as one built for entertaining. It is the kind of unbothered confidence that reads as taste rather than excess, the same instinct that separates a well-loved retreat from a merely large one.

With reporting from Architectural Digest.