On certain days, the shades of blue mesh and the infinity pool in Beth Rudin DeWoody’s back yard melds seamlessly with the Intracoastal that lies just beyond.

The illusion of perfection is not easily obtained; DeWoody had the back yard raised so that the effect would be as perfect as it is. What looks natural actually entailed a lot of hard work.

Just like art.

DeWoody’s house was built in the early 1950s in an intriguing little corner of West Palm Beach. She’s made the place into something remarkable, taking out a false ceiling so now the beams give an impression of strength and fortitude. She added pecky cypress around the windows, a hanging wooden curtain. All eccentric but of a piece. It feels like a large beach cottage, but the house hangs together - it’s a funky, stylish compound.

Everywhere there is something to delight the eye - not tchotchkes, but art. Eccentric art, angular art, modern art, all a signifier of personal style. A silver bucket in the living room is by Jeff Koons; the bathroom features a video installation that shows 50 years worth of Playboy Bunnies in machine gun order. Each space is alive with color and movement.

“I’ve always loved art, and I’ve always loved architecture,” says DeWoody, a collector, a philanthropist, a patron of the arts, a frustrated show biz baby. She’s lounging in her living room in a sweatshirt and rumpled hair, wry and unpretentious. “I was married to an artist who loved architecture. I’m a child of the ’60s, and I grew up watching ‘The Jetsons’ - the promise of the future. Everyone is influenced by the past, but let’s see something that’s speaks for today.

“Look, I like great Mediterranean-style houses, and great Plantation-style houses, but everybody thinks they have to come here and do Mediterranean and paint it mango. I call it the Boca-ing of Florida. There’s nothing wrong with white.”

In a sense, the house is a large art object that contains a multitude of other, smaller art objects. The art in DeWoody’s West Palm Beach house is cutting edge; in New York she has work by older artists - Chuck Close, Ed Ruscha, Jasper Johns. Craig Starr, a gallery owner in New York, says “her interest in art is global and not time sensitive.”

DeWoody speaks about Florida architecture with the firm conviction of someone who’s been here a long time. Her grandparents began coming to Palm Beach in the 1940s, and her parents had a house on Eden Road in Palm Beach beginning in the 1950s. This year she created the $20,000 Rudin Prize for Emerging Photographers in conjunction with the Norton Museum of Art as a way of promoting her interest in cutting edge art, and in memory of her father.

Lewis Rudin was primarily - and proudly - a creature of New York. When he died in 2001, his company owned 40 buildings valued at $2 billion, including 3,500 apartments and a building on E. 54th St. originally purchased in 1902 by his father, a Polish immigrant.

“My father didn’t collect things,” his daughter says. “He collected people. He supported the arts, and he knew how it benefitted the city. He used to say, ‘Nobody comes to New York to climb the mountains or breathe the air. They come here for the culture.’ He was very astute.”

Beth DeWoody grew up in the real estate business, but wanted to try other things. She was in the film business for a time, worked on Woody Allen’s “The Front” and “Annie Hall” as a production assistant, produced some theater, then got married, had two kids and lived in TriBeCa. “I love neighborhoods on the verge,” she says. She finally went to work for her father’s company in 1982 and found she had a knack for it.

“My dad taught me incredible things. Philanthropy. Giving back. He was a very friendly, gregarious man. He always seemed to know just what to do. For instance, I always had to ask him for directions, and he always knew them. He was generous. Not a snob. He treated a doorman or a caddy the same way he treated a President.”

The creation of the Rudin Prize, awarded in December to South American photographer Anelia Saban, was what she terms, a “spontaneous thing. We were having a meeting about doing something for young photographers, and I just said, ‘I’ll do it.’ What I particularly like is getting them going; I love bringing in established artists to recommend younger artists. When I curate shows, I love to juxtapose the old with the young.

“I just thought it would be good to do something for the art world; look how important the Pritzker prize has become in architecture.”

She began to assemble her own personality profile as a collector very early. “I always had that collecting gene. When I was a kid I collected Beatles memorabilia; I remember being furious at my mother when she threw away my collection of ‘Show’ magazines. My style has evolved, though. Certain things I collected when I was younger - Swatch watches, Beanie Babies - I wouldn’t collect today. When I was a young married, I collected Depression glass, or Rookwood pottery, and I’ve still got some of that.”

Michael Maloney runs a gallery in Los Angeles and has known DeWoody for decades. “When I first met her she was interested in Stuart Davis and the Ashcan school, the New York-based modernists, as well as contemporary artists. And she has continued to collect in a plural fashion, in different directions. There’s a photo collection, there’s a drawing collection, there’s painting and sculpture, there’s decorative arts. The work that she was collecting early on has been expanded in focus. She hasn’t dropped anything and moved on. She has built each of them.”

The through-line of DeWoody’s aesthetic is visual. Although she has a personal interest in the new, her collection - which has expanded to the point where it’s housed in a warehouse - also has a vast amount of the stylish old. Many of the Art Deco artifacts in last year’s Cocktail Culture exhibit at the Norton derived from her collection.

Central to her aesthetic is buying early, before the artist gets too well known and the price ascends into the stratosphere.

“Beth has been collecting for a long period of time, and the work she collected ten years ago is now considered significant,” says art dealer Craig Starr. “Time has proved Beth correct in her judgement. My area is more established artists; right now I’m doing an exhibition with Richard Serra. She was one of the first people to respond to his work, and immediately acquired a piece. After she did, the entire show sold out. She’s a bellwether; her reputation in the community has been established.

“She’s an amazing person, and I don’t say that about a lot of people.”

Like any collector, DeWoody remembers the pieces she didn’t buy - the ones that got away. One was a drawing by Ed Ruscha. Then there was a painting by Cy Twombly. She took too long to make up her mind about the Ruscha, and then it was gone. The Twombly cost $100,000, and at the time it might as well have been $10 million - she wasn’t able to spend $100,000 on anything.

Today, she doesn’t have a collecting budget per se; when she gets the itch, she scratches it, but as she puts it, “I always have a sense of what I’m going to pay. I don’t compete with Japanese industrialists.”

Craig Starr says that, “It’s like her house - she bought a property that suited her needs and those of her children. She could have done it in Palm Beach but it was more interesting and cooler to choose West Palm.”

The atmosphere is cool, and it’s also relaxed. A poodle she bought out of a cardboard box at the West Palm Beach Greenmarket pads around keeping a wary eye peeled to protect his mistress. DeWoody’s fiancee, the noted photographer Firooz Zahedi, is getting a massage upstairs. Both of her children are in the arts, but her nieces and nephews are in the family business with her, so the next generation of Manhattan real estate is in good hands.

For the future, there are still places she hasn’t seen in obscure corners of the world, and she still wants to produce a Broadway musical. “I’d love to sing and dance, which I can’t. If had three wishes, I would want to understand every language, and I would like to sing well.”

And the last wish?

“I’d wish for ten more wishes.”