The blown-up family photographs are stuck to the wall beside 18-month-old Eve's crib with white photographer's tape. Twelve-year-old Lily's room has just been treated to a fresh coat of aqua paint. The old white lacquer kitchen cupboards were recently replaced with custom-made maple ones; the cabinets in the master bath are due for an overhaul next. Clearly, Donna Gorman's New Canaan, Connecticut, home is never going to be finished. But that's really not the point for this down-to-earth 46-year-old, who is too busy living her life—raising two daughters (not to mention three dogs and two cats), entertaining friends, and running a business—to obsess about whether she's got the best-looking high chair on the planet or whether her rowing machine might go someplace other than next to the dining table. "This house is really lived in," says Gorman, a fabric-and-wallcoverings designer who is the U.S. representative for Marimekko, the venerable Finnish textile company. Working out of a studio tucked under her children's bedrooms, Gorman often finds herself sorting through samples of a new line of onesies, or planning a trip to Marimekko's headquarters in Helsinki, while the plink, plink, plink of Eve's Music Together CD wafts from upstairs.

Gorman's 100-year-old renovated carriage house—originally part of an estate that was subdivided in the '50s—has evolved, just as her family has. It was a clapboard bungalow on three acres when she bought it in the late '80s. She hired New York City architects Gisue and Mojgan Hariri to update and expand the house—a job that involved gutting the interior, reconfiguring the facade by replacing the clapboard with stucco, and constructing an addition. (This was, in fact, the first house built by the then up-and-coming sister team.) The result was a fluid, 3,500-square-foot space that Gorman, a confirmed modernist, feels very much at home in—even though her family has been reconfigured as well.

Next Page: Furniture is moved from room to room as Gorman rethinks the use of space.