Explanation:
Don't tell the gossip columnists, but Oscar de la Renta doesn't get out much. "I like staying home," he is saying on the veranda of his house in the Dominican Republic, which shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with Haiti. And who wouldn't, when the house in question is sugar-baron opulent and has a large full-time staff?
"What would you like to do?" the designer inquires, his Latin accent almost a burr. It's a hot Caribbean noontime. A houseman has just served us plantain chips and iced Presidente beer. De la Renta is wearing gardening shorts, Top-Siders, and a Lacoste polo shirt and has evidently been laboring along with the workmen visible at every corner of his property. "I don't understand people who say they have nothing to do," says the designer, who already today has whacked down sea grapes, directed construction of his stepdaughter's guesthouse, and rearranged the lath panels on his orchid greenhouse. "I always have another project."
His most recent one is a gated residential enclave called Corales, part of the Punta Cana Beach Resort on the Dominican Republic's eastern coast. It was here that, several years ago, de la Renta envisioned a colonnaded private house sheathed in coral rock, inspired by Sir Ronald Tree's plantation manor on Barbados. After hiring Cuban-born architect Ernesto Buch to design it, de la Renta decreed that the house would be completed in an unprecedented 10 months. "I'm a very impatient person," he says flatly. "I told Ernesto I wanted to be in the house by December twenty-second. He said it was impossible. I told him I couldn't care less."
Three days before Christmas 1998, Oscar and Annette de la Renta arrived at Corales to find a house both finished and appointed: dendrobium orchids massed in a blue-and-white bowl on a mahogany table in the hall, Pratesi linens on the beds, the complete Oxford English Dictionary regimentally shelved on pedimented bookcases, broad rattan chairs on a veranda overlooking the gin-clear Caribbean, and a laundry room furnished with a pressing table roughly the size of a helipad. "How did we do it?" asks de la Renta. "Well, I like instant results in everything I do. I told Ernesto that if it is not finished by December twenty-second, I am going to get a gun and kill him." It worked.
Now de la Renta has a further challenge, one that may require more sophisticated weaponry. Having effectively put the Dominican Republic's tony Casa de Campo hotel and residential complex on the map of high-end tourism in the 1980's by attracting both reams of publicity and a welter of his bold-faced friends, he decamped after his wife complained that their living room had become "the VIP lounge of the international airport." De la Renta enlisted friend and neighbor Julio Iglesias for an aerial shopping excursion, a
