Walk into Wendy Pepper’s house any day of the week, and if she’s not being a mom to her second-grader, she’s usually in the studio working. Local kids are down there learning to cut patterns and sew buttonholes. With four or five projects happening at once, Wendy works best in barely controlled chaos. But up here in the salon, it’s quiet except for the early music that pulsates from Wendy’s computer.

Quiet?

Wait five minutes. See who walks through the door. Chances are, it will be somebody you were not expecting to see. Wendy’s posse is made up of folks from all walks of life, all creeds and all colors. Even better chances are, you’ve probably never had a deep discussion with this person before. But all that is about to change as soon as Wendy mounts the stairs and puts the kettle on.

We’re lucky, in our small country town of Middleburg, Virginia, to have a first class saloniste in Wendy Pepper, the talented fashion designer. Without altering her productivity, the divorced working mother makes space every day for one-of-a-kind, high-level creative interactions. How does she do it?

The first set of requirements is not what you’d think, I’ve realized after observing Wendy for a few years. It’s not that you have to love people. Love people, love a party: that’s a hostess. To be a saloniste, you have to be artistically hungry, mentally flexible and mostly open.

To keep such a vibrant forum going day after day, you have to see the value in seizing the social moment. You have to be able to stop whatever art you are making with no notice, and still be civil to guests. You have to be able to pick up where you left off and keep going without complaint. Every interruption is an opportunity to you, the saloniste.

As a hermetic writer, I find this almost impossible, and a painter friend agrees. Our immersion patterns may be drastically different from artists working in high-energy, collaborative media. I hope these columns will shed light on that, and on other strange but true facts about living a creative life.

Whatever the reason, when I finish writing for the day, especially when I’m writing fiction, I feel like I’m slowly surfacing from the depths of my inner life—and there’s no way I’m making tea for unannounced visitors. That’s why I go to Wendy’s for conversation.

One famous writer once said of another, paying a high compliment, “her high art is her full life.” Wendy’s genius is that she can do both high art and full life so easily.

Wendy Pepper was born in Dayton, Ohio, the middle of three children. Her father was a Wayerhaeuser executive. The family moved to Washington, where Wendy’s mother grew up, when Wendy was six. She attended Potomac School in McLean, Virginia, then Madeira before Barnard College. Marriage to her elementary school sweetheart ended shortly after the birth of their daughter. Wendy’s former husband lives nearby. They share custody of Finley. Both parents remarried.

Thoughtful, curious, empathic and hilarious, she’s nothing like the ruthless bitch portrayed in 1994 on “Project Runway,” where Wendy showed her mettle by winning the two most commercial challenges, but somehow didn’t walk away with the $100,000 first prize after showing an amazing début collection in Bryant Park. Tim Gunn, Heidi Klum and the other Bravo producers and judges made Wendy out, wrongly, to be self-absorbed and socially clueless. She is, however, provocative.

Friends come ready to take on the full array of uncensored topics. Artists come for inspiration and encouragement. Everyone comes for understanding, for a healing dose of laughter. Everyone leaves full of new ideas, new questions, new projects. What more can you ask of great conversation?

Turns out—and it’s not what’d you’d expect from a fashion designer—Wendy is a serious thinker on a variety of subjects. She has a well-earned anthropology degree from Columbia University and a history of going straight to the source for inspiration. As you will read in our interview, she devised a 20-year self-study program of apprenticeship that included a stint in silk dyeing in Nepal. Today she works with a fabric technologist “to design from the ground up” by developing new fabrics “that have particular properties at the chemistry level.” She travels regularly to New York to speak on panels and broadcast as a fashion journalist. Last year she won $75,000 for charity on “Celebrity Poker” after studying the game for only a month.

I routinely see some pretty daunting four-inch tomes lying open on the sitting room sofa beside the empty teacup at nine in the morning. I once asked Wendy if she had always been an intellectual, and she told me no. “But I was a rebel.” She gets up at five to run/walk a mile or two, to wrap up the previous day’s business and to work on her web site. By the time I see her, dropping off our kids at school, Wendy’s been so engrossed in her morning that she’s forgotten to shower or change clothes. Wendy is a casual dresser by default. In the matter of spectacles, we vie for the quirky spinster title. But with her willowy framed and her angular movements, Wendy is unmistakably feminine. She projects a deep awareness that true beauty lies within. In any encounter, as Natalie Barney did in Paris in the 1920s, Wendy Pepper leads with the mind. She has somehow stayed hip after completely digesting the history and business of fashion, right up to the present moment, which she knows by heart the way some people know their sports statistics.

Make no mistake about Wendy’s drive to build a fashion brand from Middleburg—a daunting task, let’s face it—but she fervently believes, like Balenciaga, that the role of ladies fashion is to serve and beautify and empower the woman, not to turn her into a cultural statement about the here and now or some stylistic billboard for the next greatest thing.

If she makes it big in fashion, according to plan, Wendy Pepper will definitely become a high priest of the runway.

Maybe that explains how, when I met Wendy Pepper, she was waiting serenely for the birth of her daughter. She called me “dear” and I loved it, even though we’re the same age. When I turned to her in tears for something to wear to my cousin’s wedding, while hugely pregnant in my last trimester, Wendy made me feel like the loveliest woman in the room.

Seven years later, our girls are pals just like their moms. Wendy appears, by permission, as the character Wendy Pepper in my novel quintet Tabou. I’ve interviewed Wendy several times in the brutal aftermath of her appearance on “Project Runway,” when Wendy lost about 40 pounds over the devastating career effects of being demonized on Reality TV. This year she rebounded with an astounding, cohesive collection. My favorite piece is the cocktail maternity dress just bursting with color. You can see it (and buy it) on Wendy’s web site, www.wendypepper.com.

Read on from our unpublished interviews.

“I’m not about the youth-centered culture. Fashion’s an awkward fit for me because I’m all about serving my client. I recede into the background, which is what I think a proper designer should do.”