When my husband and I were in England some years ago, Cecil Beaton invited us for drinks. As we were walking though his garden, Beaton suddenly exclaimed, "How is the best decorator in the United States doing?" "Sister Parish?" I ventured. "Billy Baldwin?"

"No, no," he answered. "Michael Taylor. He's the innovative one. An original."

As a decorator, Michael Taylor was a revolutionary - and his influence shaped a new generation of designers, most notably the late Kalef Alaton. He brought natural materials like concrete, wicker, and timber in from the outdoors. His overscaled furniture designs became virtually synonymous with the California lifestyle. And he did more for the white room than any designer since Elsie de Wolfe or Syrie Maugham. As a man, he was charming, impractical, and sometimes difficult. But, as Stephen Sondheim wrote, "Art isn't easy."

Michael was born in 1927 in Modesto, California. His family wanted him to study medicine, but instead he took courses at the Rudolf Schaeffer School of Interior Design in San Francisco. He had a number of jobs, including one with the noted designer Archibold Taylor, before going into partnership with Francis Mihailoff in 1952. Four years later he went into business for himself. Even then, his talent for innovation was apparent. In the late 1950s I invited Michael to work with me on a display for a decorators' showcase that was to be held at the San Francisco Museum of Art, where I was on the women's board. Michael, delighted to be asked, created an outdoor scene with Philippine leather furniture, a mirror framed in shells, and lots of treillage - all painted white. The scene reminded me of the Costa Brava and I joked that all we needed was some sand. Michael said, "You're right. Go down to Leslie Salt Co. and get three bags of salt." With its white sand floor, his little cubicle shone like the crown jewels next to all the other traditional antiques-filled displays. It got a full page in House & Garden, and Michael began to attract clients from Houston to Hollywood to Hillsborough.

Many people now associate Michael with the contemporary vocabulary of white rooms and oversize concrete and upholstered furniture - which is still available through Michael Taylor Designs, the firm he founded in 1985 with Paul Weaver, who is now its president. But Michael worked throughout his career in a variety of styles, and like Frances Elkins, who was an important influence, he had the ability to mix them successfully, He would place an eighteenth-century French chair, for instance, by a table he'd made from a Roman capital or a stone mill wheel. In 1960, Michael decided that he wanted to have a shop so that he could display his furniture designs - the first one was a big oak table painted white with a concrete top - and convinced three clients (Albert Schlesinger, Maryon Davies Lewis, and Pinky Hartman) to lend him enough money to open a place on Sutter Street. Painted all white and installed with a huge oak tree, which became quite a conversation piece, the shop was frequently used for setups and was once draped in red velvet for a charity fashion show.

Maryon Davies Lewis was a notable client from this period. Michael liked to take risks and so did she. For her San Francisco house, he designed a game room with black and white checkerboard floors and fabric in shades of parrot green, azalea pink, and yellow swagged across the lyre backs of white Venetian-style chairs. The effect was utterly romantic yet totally contemporary: Thirty years later, the house is exactly as it was, and just as impressive. Another important project from this time was the house that he designed for Mr. and Mrs. William Roberts in Woodside, California. Michael orchestrated rich combinations of texture and pattern to reflect his clients' love of international travel: against living room walls of rough-hewn stone and plaster, a sofa and chairs covered in ribbed velvet sat on a very modern-looking Greek goat fur rug while a crudely carved Spanish bench stood between a pair of good antique French chairs covered in zebra cloth.

More than two decades later Michael was still working in traditional styles as well as his own - and often combining the two with refreshing results, as in the house he decorated for Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Wilsey in San Francisco. At her first meeting with Michael, Dede Wilsey told him, "I want to work with you, but I don't want a typical Michael Taylor house." Michael's back immediately went up. "And what exactly," he demanded, "is a typical Michael Taylor house?" "Oh, you know," explained Dede Wilsey. "White on white, wicker everywhere, huge over-stuffed chairs. My feet wouldn't touch the floor. I'd feel like a pygmy." Fortunately, Michael thought that was very funny, and he and his clients became great friends. And he gave her beautiful rooms, all in Dede Wilsey's favorite colors. He was disconcerted to hear that she wanted a pink living room, but he followed her lead, draping the room's three sets of French doors and two windows in striped pink taffeta. To keep it from looking too sweet, he added two stone cocktail tables shaped like elephants. A sofa from a Syrie Maugham design was covered in green hand-cut velvet.

At a party in the Wilsey's garden room, which Michael had decorated in his characteristic palette of whites, another of his clients spotted a terrazzo table and rushed up to him, almost weeping. "That's my table," she said. "Exactly the same as mine. How could you do this to me?" Michael always laughed when he told this story. "These ladies think nothing of wearing the same dress to a party, and they have their pictures taken in it for Women's Wear Daily. The dress looks different on each of them. Why wouldn't this table look different in different rooms?

Michael could be quite impractical. He once left his Rolls-Royce parked with the engine running when he came to visit, and, when he went back outside, the car was gone. Fortunately, the thief was only a student from the art school nearby who wanted to take the car out for a spin around the block. As was so often the case, Michael landed on his feet. He could also be generous and maddening, frequently at the same time. A compulsive decorator on and off the job, Michael once sold me a set of taffeta curtains that a client didn't want. He insisted that they would give my living room "a cozy, sort of Renoir look," and indeed they did. A number of years later, Michael was sitting in my living room and out of the blue he said, "Why don't you get rid of those Sally Stanford curtains?" Sally Stanford, for those unfamiliar with San Francisco lore, was known to run the best little whorehouse in the Bay Area.

Late in his life Michael made several trips to the Far East and, fascinated by the way the Japanese used natural materials, he began to change his thinking about design. He admonished clients to eliminate unnecessary bibelots. He started using large slabs of concrete, river rocks, twig sculptures, and slate floors. Gorham and Diana Knowles's house at Lake Tahoe is a perfect example of this phase of Michael's career. In the living room, the coffee table is a piece of raw rock that weights 2,800 pounds. It was a housewarming present from Michael to Diana Knowles, who was so frightened by it that she fled to Tahoe City until the rock was safely installed.

Michael's own house, which he bought in 1970 after he closed the shop, was a repository for editions of the beautiful objects he bought for his clients. "This house is the best way I know to 'live above the store'," he once said. Michael also said, to all his clients, "When in doubt, throw it out," but he never threw anything away; his house was crammed with everything from African art to a German baroque chest, and it had a wonderful mystique.

Michael's belongings were auctioned at Butterfield and Butterfield in San Francisco in 1987, a year after he died of AIDS at the age of 59. It was quite an event; all his clients were there. Michael was always terrible with money, and he had died over $3 million in debt. But the auction brought $3.4 million, so once again Michael Taylor landed on his feet.