OFFICE PROUD
Reproduced Courtesy of:

December 20, 2001

Crown Prince of Papering and Painting
By WILLIAM L. HAMILTON

SOMEWHERE between the first adult prophylaxis, in front of the gold baroque mirror,
and the fitting for the occlusal orthotic device, next to the silver Art Deco floor lamp, I
realized that my dentist, Dr. Michael C. Iott, loves to decorate.

Antoine Bootz for The New York Times

Michael C. Iott's opulent farmhouse-style home.

His offices, in a storefront on Third Avenue at 32nd Street, are on their third wallpaper in three years: Ascot Tartan by Brunschwig & Fils. His apartment, upstairs in the same nondescript newish building, is on its fourth.

Downstairs, in the yellow reception room last month, Dr. Iott in scrub blues stood, arms folded, deep in consultation with a patient.

"Nine nineteen, but a shade darker," he said. "Benjamin Moore calls it Spanish Yellow. It's a good color when you don't have a lot of light." The patient, beneath the arched federal- style molding that Dr. Iott had installed above the appointment desks, said, "It's beautiful."

The impressive fireplace and mantel, with shaded candle sconces to each side of the gold-framed oil painting with the brass portrait light, are fake and were installed at the
same time.

And yes, those are dentil moldings at the ceiling.

"We get a lot of walk-in patients," said Cindy Espinosa, the patient coordinator for the
office. "They see how the office looks. They make an appointment. I have to know the
paint or the paper, people are going to ask."

Antoine Bootz for The New York Times Michael C. Iott's office's Christmas-village mantel.

Dr. Iott has advised patients and colleagues on home and office design. His Web site (www.smiletonight.com) has a page for design consultations.

But he isn't quitting his day job. Dr. Iott lets a tuft of pleasure escape when the subject of dentistry comes up.

"I would do it even if I didn't earn a living doing it," he said. "The way people look before and after, patients love it. Being a dentist is like being an artist."

Dr. Iott, at home, smiled that professional snake charmer's smile that gets you past the descending whir of the drill.

"I'll give you a comparison between a room and teeth," he said, sitting in jeans and a T-shirt on his Chinese-red cotton damask sofa in a wallpapered living room, whose style he described as farmhouse, which might more closely be described as Kips Bay farmhouse.

"Making a tooth longer makes someone look younger," he explained. "Young people
usually have longer front teeth, and they're not straight 90-degree edges." Dr. Iott
will add a piece of veneer to a tooth to achieve that effect. He also put out a bowl of
plastic apples to bring the decoration of his waiting room to life.

"It's the little things that make something work," he said. "Who would think you need a
dollar fifty's worth of red plastic apples to make a room pop?"

Dr. Iott's office, with its nine examining rooms and 30 associates, also has French
balloon shades on the street window in the waiting room, a Chippendale settee, a lyre-
back side table with oil portraits of dogs and ships above it, Regency side chairs, Cerec
3 robotic milling machines for ceramic crowns and bridges, a Diagnodent laser cavity
detector and a china and crystal cabinet for after-hours brandy or wine with patients or
his staff. Dr. Iott, who cooks for the office three nights a week, likes to entertain.

Antoine Bootz for The New York Times

Dr. Iott in a tartan exam room.

This month, there are also 49 miniature porcelain cottages, a wallpapered, painted andfurnished 2-by-3- foot five-room house, which he titled "Christmas in the City" ("Christmas in the Country," its twin, is in the apartment) and a working O-gauge train set and village.

Many people think of Christmas and the holiday season as an opportunity to make the home or office look festive. Dr. Iott, who devotes the four days after Thanksgiving to the process, thinks of it as the North Star of the decorating year. The dollhouses will be donations to the pediatric neurosurgery unit of the Beth Israel Medical Center.

Dr. Iott, who was born in Deerfield, Mich., in 1948, and attended a two- room school without indoor plumbing, decorated his first room at age 10, using money he earned working for his uncles at the general store. He ordered a desk, a bed, a bookcase, a captain's chair, a black tole lamp and two wicker cornucopias for his bedroom, an unheated 10-by-10- foot room, from a Sears catalog. They cost $200.

"I wanted my own furniture, I didn't want someone's castoffs," said Dr. Iott, who has five brothers and two sisters. "I had an idea what opulence was. Very rococo. I was a major reader, I read the home design magazines and furniture catalogs at the library."

Dr. Iott also recalled his altar to the Virgin Mary.

"May is Mary's month," he said. "Every Catholic child had a May altar in their bedroom, something you make out of cigar boxes and crepe paper, and a statue of Mary.

"I had fresh lilacs. It was a to-die- for May altar."

He received early encouragement from an aunt.

"My eccentric Aunt Audrey came over and said: `Oh, you're going to be really famous doing this some day. You're talented.' " Dr. Iott leaned forward, toward the steel coffee table with swans' heads at each corner and thick green beveled glass. "Everybody else in the family thought her house looked like a furniture store," he said. A tall, five-panel coromandel folding screen crowded the corner to his right.

Dr. Iott's mother was also an ambitious amateur decorator. His father was a butcher, who later started an insurance company.

"I remember my mother, she would have been 24, wearing the pedal pushers and the saddle shoes, wallpapering the dining room of this Victorian farmhouse," Dr. Iott said, surveying his living room as though it were a theatrical scrim with a light coming up behind it. "This kind of dark purple with big Carleton Varney, Dorothy Draper magnolia flowers, and then the other walls were done in a kind of trellis. For a farm woman who never lived farther than 15 miles from where she was born, to put up your own wallpaper, in two wild patterns, that was a statement."

It still is.

"Wallpaper seems like such a great way to make a New York apartment seem like a real house," Dr. Iott said. His apartment is kilted by tartan plaid on every wall except the guest bedroom, where there is a toile de Jouy paper, and the kitchen, where there is a Sturbridge Village folk art paper.

Wallpaper has helped the office, too.

"The reality of it, there's an X- ray developing machine in the corner," he said. "So we put up wallpaper, and it's a less unpleasant corner."

The office's bulletin board has a heavy carved gilt frame. The patients' mahogany bathroom vanity is a harpsichord, originally gutted for use as a desk. Dr. Iott refitted it as a sink and counter.

He said he has no idea what it will be next. Like most decorators, he likes to keep his ideas in motion.

In January, Dr. Iott hired Cathleen McCandless, a feng shui consultant based in La Jolla, Calif., to vet the decoration in his office and home for success in realizing professional and personal ambitions.

Ms. McCandless gave the office high marks. The result was "soft," an A plus, Ms. McCandless reported, "because people associate dentists with sharpness and pain," she wrote.

Dr. Iott's intentions for his home were trickier. He told Ms. McCandless in a questionnaire that his goals included less clutter and a love life.

Viewing the ornately decorated apartment, Ms. McCandless decided to work on his love life.

"She said, `Look at the love area of your apartment,' " he recalled. In feng shui, there are nine spatial parts in the home, oriented to the compass. Dr. Iott's "relationship" area is part of the guest room, a guest bathroom, a hallway and a closet.

"You have nothing but drawings of shipwrecks," she told him, Dr. Iott said. "Lonely, mournful single women in oil paintings. There's nothing but disaster in this corner of the apartment. You've got all of these relatives in Michigan who were married 75 years. Put them over here." Family photographs were moved. The strategy was a success, he said.

The apartment's eclectic richness was achieved with an eye to effect, not expense. "I don't like spending a lot of money," Dr. Iott said. "You add all of this up, and it would equate to a designer's consultation fee."

Most of the artwork was bought at auction at Tepper Galleries on Lexington Avenue, as was much of the furniture and chandelier lighting, including the fake fireplace and the two Victorian gilt-framed oil paintings flanking it.

Dr. Iott also shopped at store closeouts and apartment sales in his building. The flotilla of large silver serving pieces in the breakfront cabinet are Goodwill purchases, $110, total. Dr. Iott had them replated.

The two Eastlake chairs in the dining room were wedding gifts to his great-grandparents.

"I took them back as checked baggage from Michigan," he said.

Dr. Iott has consulted with his patients on their apartments, too.

"I needed help with colors and drapes," said Joy-Denise Burke, a patient for 15 years. "I was turning a dark maid's room into a den. He said, `If you want to make it bright, paint it red.' Red? Wow! But I went for it, and it looks great. Every time I came in, he showed me fabrics and said, `Here's what I'm thinking, pick one.' "

Dr. Iott also insisted that Mrs. Burke come back 15 times to get the color right on cosmetic work he was completing on her teeth. "I would say, `That looks good,' " she explained, "and he would say: `No, too yellow. It needs to be bluer.' "

"It's because he's a decorator," said Mrs. Burke, who quickly expressed pleasure with Dr. Iott as a dentist, too. "If something doesn't look good, he'll redo it."