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Mr. Chwast, now 74, married Ms. Scher in 1973. They divorced five years later - "time off for bad behavior," Mr. Chwast said dryly - and remarried in 1989. They now live in a modern Chelsea loft right around the corner from Pentagram that they moved into last January. It is furnished with 20th-century classics, including a Le Corbusier lounge chair and dining chairs by Alvar Aalto, and with a rug in a pattern of abstracted U's that Ms. Scher pointed to with delight as her own design. "It's a typographic rug," she said. The walls are decorated with art by Mr. Chwast, including a giant sheet-metal cutout depicting a jumble of shoes, from cowboy boots to high heels, that hangs over the bed.
Ms. Scher paints skewed, text-heavy maps like "South America."
"He hates that I'm always leaving piles of shoes around the house," Ms. Scher said.
She added that she had designed the apartment to be "the opposite of country: clean, no moldings, very anti-object."
Mr. Chwast's collection of toy motorcycles, he said, were one of the few things that "happily survived the recent disdain for decorative objects in favor of modern ones" in the couple's city place. Those and the toys of their two Australian shepherds, Mickie and Mattie, are about the only bits of whimsy in the chrome, red, black and white loft. (During the week, Mattie goes with Ms. Scher to Pentagram every day, Mickie tends to go to Push Pin.)
The couple's house in Connecticut, which has two guesthouses, a garden and a pool, is the stylistic opposite of the New York apartment: a turn-of-the-century Arts and Crafts cottage with a Stickley dining table and chairs, and other furniture that Ms. Scher describes as "overstuffed sloppy." It is also the place where the art gets made.
Ms. Scher and Mr. Chwast often retreat to their respective studios late on a Friday and work all night.
"Paula always has more left over," Mr. Bierut said. "Excess inventory that builds up during the week. All this extra stuff - extra ideas, extra words, extra colors, all these extra square feet of information that the client just isn't able to accommodate."
As close as the paintings may be to her design work, there is a crucial difference for Ms. Scher. "The thing about corporate work is it involves other people," she said. "Painting does not involve anybody."
Not even each other. Both Ms. Scher and Mr. Chwast are adamant that they have no interest in collaborating. "Never," Mr. Chwast said, deadpan. "There's no professional courtesy between us."
Mr. Chwast works in a large studio with lots of windows and light that occupies the entire third floor of the house and overlooks the gardens. Ms. Scher has a converted guest bedroom. But she isn't bitter about the disparity. "He has a lot of space but no walls," she said. Her husband added, "My walls are smaller, so my paintings are smaller."
In the city, however, Mr. Chwast has claimed the prime wall space. Eight of the 53 pieces in his "Brylcreem Man" series, mixed media applied to silk screen, hang above the couple's dining table - at least for now. "That wall was built for 'Africa,' " Ms. Scher said with conviction.
