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It’s almost like a Good Housekeeping cover from 1961.

The Kodak-ready house. The careful landscaping. The lady’s bicycle leaning fetchingly on the porch. The woman in a floral print house dress waiting impatiently at the front door.

“I don’t know why you’d think that I lived in the red house,” she says. “Oh, well, it doesn’t matter.”

This is Olga Hirshhorn, who has donated 250 pieces to be auctioned tonight, with proceeds going to the Philhamonic Museum of Art. The works, which includes jewelry, silver, 60 paintings, tribal art, a player piano with more than 400 rolls, and a wrought-iron doorstop collection, was appraised at $100,000 in 1985. Not even Hirshhorn, who built the collection with multimillionaire art acquisitor Joseph Hirshhorn after their marriage in 1964, knows what it’s worth now.

She moves into the house: “May I give you a tour?” She stops, half turning as if she’d suddenly remembered something in the other room. “You are not going to say where I live, are you?”

Hirshhorn, 85, doesn’t want the location of her house or even detailed descriptions of the rooms or the art there revealed in this — or any — story.

I live alone, she explains simply.

“You can say,” she says after settling into a chair on a lanai, more living room than screened porch, “you can say, ‘As she sits at her desk she can see her three DeKoonings, a Giacometti sculpture and on the right wall is a Motherwell. Plus, other friends, other works.’”

She nods to herself.

Hirshhorn doesn’t do interviews. She doesn’t want the publicity, doesn’t need it. The time of her life that pivoted on the spotlight glare of galas, gallery and museum openings, of jetsetting from one artist (Georgia O’Keeffe’s Abiquiu ranch, say, for the painter’s birthday) to another (the Hirshhorn home on the French Riviera, relaxing with Picasso), all that’s done. This is the rare exception, she says, because she wants to publicize the auction.

“I don’t want my life to be as complicated as it was when my husband was alive,” she says. A breeze sends a distant chime into celebration. “All the comings and goings. I was involved with my involvements and I was involved in his involvements.”

In pictures and in the art, Joseph Hirshhorn benignly haunts this house. Probably the other three houses she owns as well. And she falls into disseminating his life, his mission with little prompting.

His mother, a widow, and his sister came to the United States from Latvia, she starts. They eventually brought the 12 children, including the 4-year-old Joseph, to Brooklyn. He left school to work at 13, and by 16, he had plumbed his $255 in savings to become a stockbroker. Two years later, he bought his first two pieces of art: two etchings by Albrecht Durer for $150.

He came to personify the American dream, parlaying a mid-century fortune in uranium interests into warehouse floors and homes and gardens of artwork by the superstars of the time. Hirshhorn, who the New York Times once said “always bought from feeling, not from calculation,” died in 1981, doubling the holdings of the museum that was created, in his name, by an act of Congress in 1966, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution.

As if in another world, Olga Zatorsky was raised in a modest home in Greenwich, Conn., the youngest of three children in a blue-collar Ukrainian family. As a teen, she married her high school English teacher, and by 25, had three boys and a rocky marriage that would not last.

By 41, she turned an odd-job business she ran out of her home into a successful employment agency. Joseph Hirshhorn got to know her through phone calls, sometimes as many as 10 a day, in his search for a chauffer and upstairs maid.

“The day I met Mr. Hirshhorn, the butler led me through the house to the garden,” she says. “It was a very hot day and he was sitting on a stool in his bathing trunks. Laura Ziegler — z-i-e-g-l-e-r — was doing a bust of him. Those were the days before portable phones and the butler would come out to tell him he had a call. He had to go inside to get it. One of those times, I asked Laura, ‘Who is this Mr. Hirshhorn anyway?’”

Ziegler recommended Aline Saarinen’s book, called “The Proud Possessors,” which profiled American art collectors, including her husband-to-be. Before she could get it at the library, Hirshhorn sent a copy to her himself.

The marriage — a kind of fairytale for collectors — changed her life. “When we married I left the Victorian furniture (I collected) and moved into a mansion that had museum quality examples of Oriental rugs, of American furniture and art,” she says. “It was a whole different world. I was friends with dealers, with artists, with collectors. It was a total immersion in art for me.”

The first work she bought on her own was a Josef Albers, whose Minimalist paintings of layers of squares and color typified art’s drive away from centuries of preoccupation with content and into pure color and form.

Eventually, she amassed a Grand Canyon of interests, from A-list artists to the relatively affordable objet d’art, like toasters and pencil sharpeners, rough-hewn santos, wrought-iron doorstops, Eskimo carvings, Oceanic masks, bits of cultural detritus reframed as art. Some years back, her collection toured museums in America as well as Japan and India.

“The most exciting thing was seeing it in a gallery in New Delhi,” she says, glancing into the house. “It was a very good feeling that my judgment in collecting was worthy of that. Don’t forget that I have no formal training. It was all exposure.”

But she’s also come to a natural turning in the road, and not long ago, she sold the 10,000-square-foot Port Royal house, which had a gallery that encompassed the building as well as six bedrooms and three bathrooms. The new house, which she designed and built about a year ago, is three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a more modest 3,800 feet.

“There’s no room,” she says. A door somewhere deep in the house squeaks, almost in agreement.

“I used to use one flatware one night and another flatware another night,” she says. Hirshhorn shakes her head, the pixieish gray bob staying nicely in place. “I don’t want to do that anymore.”

Last fall, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., chose 618 important pieces from her collection. And of course, she has donated the 250 works for the local museum.

“She called us about a year ago and said she had some silver she wanted to give us,” says Jean Skinner, the president of the Friends of Art, which supports the museum. “Then about six weeks ago, she said she had some other stuff to give us. The only thing was, we had to take it now or she would give it to someone else.

“I already had four fundraisers going for this month and I thought, we can’t let someone else get this. It should go to us.”

Skinner expects a few hundred people for tonight’s auction, which features museum-quality work at modest opening bids.

The work she’s given away still means something to her, she says, when you ask about it. She says it almost defensively, almost as if she’s been accused of giving away a child for being too fat. “They are all things that mean something. They’ve all hung in my house and come off a wall, a shelf or something. I lived with it.”

As for buying regrets, she has a few. “Of course, of course. I never bought an Andy Warhol and they were so cheap then. I never bought a Hockney or a Louise Bourgeois. Regrets. Of course there are regrets. But I bought what I liked and I lived with it.

And she doesn’t miss it? That chase for something a little more wonderful?

“No,” she says evenly, “because it was great fun while it lasted and I’ve got so many good memories.”

She thinks for a moment. “I don’t want to buy something and just put it in a warehouse. I’m 85. I’m in a different place. I still have enough.”

If You Go

What: Olga Hirshhorn Collection Auction

When: 6 tonight Hayes Hall lobby for silent auction; 7:30 p.m. Daniels Pavilion for live auction

Where: Philharmonic Center for the Arts, 5833 Pelican Bay Blvd.

Cost: $30, which includes open bar and hors d’oeurves

Information: 597-1900