Some people say you can tell a lot about a person by the look of her home. I sincerely hope that's not true. If it is, I've got multiple-personality disorder. In the past ten years, I have moved six times. Each relocation has resulted in a complete reinvention of my surroundings, from neutral linens and bohemian block prints in Los Angeles to nailheaded furniture and bold colors like eggplant in Manhattan. So when my husband, George Stephanopoulos, host of ABC's Sunday news program This Week, and I settled in Washington, D.C., a few years ago with all the seashells I'd been collecting since childhood, I found myself faced with a Colonial Revival house in Georgetown and a palette trained in Hollywood. More important, how could my fragile branches of Pacific coral survive a house full of kids?

To answer this and other pressing domestic questions, I called my style shrink, interior designer Elizabeth Martin. My roommate in boarding school, she had transformed our 12-foot-square dorm room into a Paris-style pied-à-terre. This time around, Beth did what any friend with a passion for Oly furniture and David Hicks textiles would do--grabbed her swatches and jumped on a plane.

We started with a whimsical color--fuchsia--inspired by my princess-obsessed daughters, Elliott and Harper. So the first thing you see when you walk through the front door is a pink settee paired with a black-and-white nude by Lucian Freud. These, plus a faux-python-covered console table and a glimpse of a powder room lined with coral-pattern wallpaper, set the tone for the whole house. That vibrant pink is repeated all over, from plump Moroccan poufs in the living room to the girls' bedroom walls.

Back to those seashells. My collection was doubled upon moving to Washington, after I acquired specimens left to Harvard University by my maternal grandmother, Janet Elliott Wulsin, who explored the Far East in the 1920s for the National Geographic Society. Beth now had to make sense of a living room in the heart of the nation's capital suddenly besieged by an undersea stockpile. She painted the walls a heavenly greyhound color with a hint of lavender and then framed the windows with gunmetal silk curtains spilling onto a white wool rug speckled with starfishlike motifs I applied by hand using violet fabric dye. George allowed one wall to be turned into a museum of natural history. Joined by my lilac sea fans, the shells are displayed in groups, with rare examples elevated on Plexiglas stands. Decorative mercury-glass objects are tucked here and there for relief, and on one wall is a Donald Jurney oil painting of the French countryside at dusk.

When it came to the dining room, I didn't relish the thought of Republicans and Democrats (our entertaining is strictly bipartisan) slurping up linguine and clams while they stared at paintings of fox hunts amid an explosion of flowered chintz, which is pretty much the Georgetown standard. Instead Beth boldly built the room around a tangerine African feathered headdress and placed the dining table on a zebra-skin rug. Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs of snake charmers and dancing cobras add a soupçon of Asia (my grandmother surely would have approved), and Beth paid homage to my Neptune theme with coral-color curtains and bronze scallop-shell sconces by Jonathan Browning.

Architecturally, the family room is an overwhelmingly large space complete with a bay window and fireplace. I wanted it to have a cozy feeling while still functioning as a study for George, a Nintendo Wii play area for the girls, and a gallery for our landscape paintings. As far as our decorator was concerned, no sooner said than done. Beth repeated the coral motif of the dining room inside the family room's bookcases and with an occasional Ankasa pillow. The comfort factor we desired is answered by a dark-brown sectional sofa--and since the walls are painted a soothing shade that resembles fine milk chocolate, of course we call it the Godiva room.

I like more masculinity and less lace in a master bedroom. Beth agreed and gave us a café-au-lait color scheme with a hint of cantaloupe. The sunny space is a pleasing mixture of dark to light browns, ranging from the leopard-spot curtains to the pecan-color rug. This has made George and me happy, but the secret to a good marriage really is separate baths. Lotus-flower wallpaper lines both these spaces off the bedroom, but that is where the similarities end. Capiz-shell sconces and an antique Swedish mirror give my bath a soigné touch, while my husband's has a brown window shade and pewter sconces with cream lampshades. Take it from me, there is nothing like a dose of design therapy. Beth made sense of our abundance of art, flea-market finds, and natural wonders and channeled it all into a sophisticated home with just the right splash of whimsy. And if I'm lucky, I'll never have to move again.