Cristina Saralegui's home is very much like the Univisión talk show hostess herself: warm, effusive and, yes, a bit playful. She does not do subdued well, nor does she strive to match wingback chair to sofa. That by-the-numbers decor would be so . . . well, so un-Cristina.

Instead, the 12-time Emmy Award winner who five years ago launched Casa Cristina, a line of home furnishings inspired by her Hispanic roots and eclectic tastes, is all about color and clutter and confounding expectations.

''Oh, yes, I'm the queen of clutter,'' she says, with a chuckle and a wave of her hand that encompasses numerous collections of saints and angels and boxes. ``I like to be surrounded with what I love.''

Saralegui, mother of two, stepmother of one and grandmother to a toddler, shares her Pinecrest home with her musician/manager husband, Marcos Avila, and their youngest, Jon Marcos, 23. There is little pretense here -- she greets a visitor perfectly coiffed but in jeans -- and a lot of what she calls ''mix and match, anything goes with everything'' style.

Saralegui's cardinal rule of decorating, one she began honing as soon as she moved into her first apartment at 26, is straightforward: ``You make your home look like you.''

Saralegui, 61, learned to decorate from her late mother, who applied a generous Cuban touch to a Basque heritage and the influence of a stint in Saudi Arabia to create a style all her own. And like her mother, she is not above discovering the perfect piece in someone else's discards. In fact, the elder Saralegui and two of her friends picked up a butacon -- an armchair -- on the streets of St. Augustine and drove down with it strapped to the car roof. She gave it to her daughter, who had it re-upholstered and kept it for years, until her niece begged for it.

Saralegui and Avila, one of the founding members of the Miami Sound Machine, moved to their current 10,000-square-foot house about five years ago after a long search for a new place. Before that the family lived on Palm Island, the next island over from good friends Gloria and Emilio Estefan. But there was no privacy, and people would cruise by in their boats, taking pictures with their cellphones as the family relaxed by the pool. In their new house, citing a need for privacy, they would not allow a Miami Herald photographer to take pictures for this article.

TOO MODERN

Previously owned by baseball great Andre Dawson, the new house was not exactly what Saralegui wanted. ''To me it was too new, too modern,'' she recalls. ``I like old.''

She and Avila, however, worked up a plan to make it fit their tastes. The couple immediately enclosed the house's 2,000 square feet of terrace and patio with floor-to-ceiling glass. (Saralegui admits she doesn't like the heat.) They then added wood to the ceiling and walls of a reading room, as well as wooden arches in the halls that lead to the bedrooms. The wood, reclaimed from old barns, gives the house a more rustic feel.

''I love textures and I got the idea to add the wood from a monastery I visited in Mexico,'' Saralegui says.

As with the unusual mix of wood beams and marble floor, the house is a blend of the eclectic and the exotic. There are pieces she and Avila have bought during their travels, items friends and family have given them and many pieces from her Casa Cristina line, currently sold at Kohl's and specialty stores. Crosses of all sizes hang between oils and watercolors.

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