Butyl acetate can be produced by the reaction of methyl acetate with butanol in a reversible, liquid-phase, mildly exothermic reaction. Methanol is the second product. The chemical equilibrium constant is less than unity, so the reactor effluent contains significant amounts of the reactants, which must be recovered for recycle back to the reactor. The volatilities are such that there are three distillation columns and two recycles. The nonideal vapor-liquid equilibrium results in two azeotropes that must be considered. The first column C1 takes the two light components overhead (methyl acetate and methanol) and the two heavy components out of the bottom (butanol and butyl acetate). The C1 distillate is fed to a second column, which produces product methanol out of the bottom and a recycle stream of the methyl acetate/methanol azeotrope in the distillate. The C1 bottoms is fed to a third column, which produces product butyl acetate out of the bottom and a recycle stream of butanol in the distillate. Because the butanol recycle is vaporized only once and the methyl acetate recycle is vaporized twice, we would intuitively expect the economically optimum design of this process to feature larger butanol recycle flow rates than methyl acetate recycle flow rates. This paper demonstrates that this expectation is not true. The butanol recycle column must be operated at high pressure to avoid the butanol/butyl acetate azeotrope, so a higher-temperature, more costly heat source is needed to recycle butanol. Other design optimization variables include the reactor temperature, reactor size, and butanol recycle composition. A plantwide control structure is also developed, and its effectiveness in the face of very large disturbances is demonstrated by dynamic simulation.