It's a funny thing about good design: The better it gets, the more it seems almost to disappear.

And so it is with this house in northern Baltimore County. As you approach it you don't wonder who the architect was. You don't ask who designed the landscaping. Inside you don't even notice the mark of an interior designer.

You just think how lovely and calm and peaceful it all seems on this beautiful May afternoon -- calm, that is, until the dogs start wrestling with each other and a disembodied voice begins calling, "Bubba . . . Bubba . . . Bubba."

"This is Bubba," the owner says, walking into the kitchen past a large green parrot in a cage. "Bubba just entered the picture. I think when my children went away to college and left home I added Bubba for confusion. For the constant noise."

The owners do not wish to be identified either by name or by description. It is enough to say they are a married couple with four children, two Labrador retrievers, two West Highland terriers and of course, Bubba, the parrot.

And because the lady of the house is our guide this afternoon, it is her perspective, that of an avid gardener and the designer of most of the landscaping, that we hear.

They have lived here for five years, a fact that is remarkable only when you hear the list of things they have added: brick terraces and walkways that wrap around three sides of the house, the pool, the trellises, the entrance yard, a building that is garage plus garden shed plus guest house, the curving driveway, and most of the landscaping, including a perennial garden, a woodland shade garden, boxwood hedges and the vegetable garden.

And yet it all fits together so seamlessly, you are unaware of any recent change, much less of designers wanting to leave their mark. It seems more like one of those English houses that have been in the same family for many years, the project of generation after generation with an innate sense of style and a deep love of gardening.

"We moved here from the city five years ago. And I like to garden. It's as simple as that," she says, looking slightly uncomfortable about having to define their very private lives.

"The gardens around the house are an extension of the living area," she continues. "I grew up in Southern California where all your gardens were a part of your living area. Houses are built around patios, or lanais, they call them. So that you open onto a garden no matter what room you're in. Maybe that is one reason why we have so many gardens."

Each part of the house, in fact, opens onto a different brick terrace with outdoor furniture -- some iron, some carved redwood stained gray. These terraces, she explains, help to make the house seem larger.

"With four children, it's just nice to have an extended house during the spring, summer and fall."

The house is Dutch colonial in style, painted by the former owners a soft sage green with white shutters and black trim. When the present owners moved in they hired an architect, Arthur D. Valk, to make some minor changes.

Because Dutch colonial houses can look boxy, he extended the look of the house by adding a white fence with an archway to one side of the house and by adding an overhead trellis extending out from the kitchen door.

The kitchen itself was completely redesigned, also by Mr. Valk, and a small addition -- just 4 1/2 feet across the end of the room -- enabled him to add a skylight, storage and a small area for a table and chairs.

"The big difference is the light," she says. "The skylight has just changed it immensely. The room has a northern exposure and it was very dark, but now the skylight makes it a very cheerful room."

They then turned to the basement as a way to expand their living space. They turned it into a small office area and larger family room with a pool table and wet bar at one end and a seating area around the television at the other.

Family photographs line the walls of the stairs, continue around the walls of the office and into the large family room beyond.

The furnishings in the house are traditional, leaning toward the English country style with flowered chintzes and plaids and warm polished wood. Some of the furniture was inherited, other pieces were obtained from cousins who have an antiques business in Kennett Square, Pa.

Kathryn Rienhoff of Kathryn Rienhoff Interiors Ltd. in Ruxton picked out the printed chintzes for the upholstered pieces plus curtains and wallpaper.

There are touches of whimsy throughout. In the den a family of iron pigs sits under an antique library table. "I started collecting these pigs 18 years ago with one of the little ones. They're from England. I got them in Charleston, South Carolina. Then over a period of 15 to 18 years we got one every time we went down to Charleston. And then Papa Pig I got here in Baltimore. They put wax paste on these.

"They are heavy," she says hefting up one of the small ones. "You can't move Papa."

Next to the fireplace in the den is an iron goat. Outside there are iron and cement rabbits, another iron pig plus sculptures of a gorilla and an otter nearly hidden among the foliage.

On the wall above the family of pigs is framed a faded antique embroidered sampler, done by a member of the husband's family.

The walls of the dining room above the chair rail are covered with a paper that simulates a blue and white striated faux finish. Curtains and valances match it.

One wall is dominated by a large Eugene Leake landscape. "In the wintertime you can sit here and it can be a horrible gray and white day outside but you can look at that picture and immediately think of what it looks like in the spring and summer. It's wonderful."

In the more formal living room, the curtains, love seat and sofa are covered with a flowered chintz in tones of red, blue, green and pink. The flowers in the fabric echo the colors and varieties of the flowers just outside the door in a perennial garden that sweeps along that side of the house.

The garden is where she spends most of her time during the warmer months. Her involvement with gardening has increased dramatically since she moved from the city, she says, but you can see an innate sense of design.

"I have an art background," she says. "I like to create. I think gardening is a self-expression. You're creating, obviously, but you're putting in something that's alive and growing.

"It's not a hit-and-miss but there are lots of mistakes you make. It's like decorating. When you move your chairs around the living room or change the pictures on the wall, you do the same thing in the garden. If something's not happy in a certain spot you move it. It lets you know and you move it. You change the color of the walls when you're tired of it and it changes the personality of the room. You do the same thing with gardens, just change the personality."

The gardens seems much older than just five years because of the large English boxwoods that give a subtle structure. Some of the boxwoods were original to the house, others were transplanted.

There are also Chinese and Korean boxwoods planted around the house. "I find it fascinating to mix them because of the texture differences. You can look at them and know they're box but you can see how different they are."

Out beyond the orchard and the pool, away from the shade around the house, is an enclosed garden with raised beds -- a mix of vegetable, flower and herb garden. "I looked through several books, especially herb books. And this is a copy of an English herb garden," she says.

In the center of the vegetable garden is a littleleaf lilac trained as a standard. "It was solid blooms two weeks ago and fragrant." Underneath it are drifts of lavender, pansies and johnny jump-ups.

She stops to pull out a weed. "When I first moved out here, having grown up out on the West Coast, I knew nothing about eastern gardening. And in my garden I had these wonderful bushy-looking plants. I was positive they were perennials and I'd water them and I'd prune them.

"And one day somebody came out, someone who was raised in Baltimore came out and said, 'What are you doing with all that ragweed?' " she says with a laugh.

"Ragweed really looks very respectable until toward the end, then it just goes bananas and you know it's a weed. But before that it looks very contained as though it has a great purpose."

She credits Ladew gardens with providing inspiration as well as information for her own gardening. "I think Ladew is Maryland's best-kept secret. So many of these gardens that you go to are intimidating. They're overpowering and formal. But I don't feel intimidated at Ladew and I've learned so much there, asking questions from the ground crew. It's a wonderful place."

When asked what her next garden project is, she sighs. "That's the problem, that you keep thinking, oh, it would be a great idea to move this there and do this and do that. And it's never-ending. It's hard to put a halt."