Restaurant Design: New York's Nobu 57

Nobu 57 is closed, but the phones are ringing and people are knocking on the window, hoping perhaps for news of a last-minute cancellation. Inside the staff is flush with the news of a three-star review in the New York Times, and David Rockwell, giving me a tour of the restaurant his firm designed, is congratulating the cooks we encounter, quipping to each of them, "I hope I can still get a table."

Read the Entire Metropolis Magazine Article Here

Trend: Dublin Design

By VIRGINIA GARDINER, NEW YORK TIMES, January 5, 2006

Letterfrack, a bleak and boggy village in western Ireland, was once best known for a reform school run by the Christian Brothers that was rife with physical and sexual abuse. Some 100 boys died there in its 87 years of operation, before it finally closed in 1974 - a dismal record even by the standards of church-run Irish reformatories.

Thirteen years later, when the Letterfrack Furniture College opened, it could not afford a new building, and instead took up residence in the prisonlike, seemingly haunted reform school. It was an odd start for an institution intended to reverse the depressed town's fortunes, and for several years the college operated on a meager budget with a skeletal staff, offering vocational training in furniture design and production to local students. But now Letterfrack is becoming famous for the furniture college, which as of 2002 has a stylish modern campus designed by the celebrated Dublin architecture firm O'Donnell & Tuomey. The school, now known for the exceptional quality of its graduates' wood furniture, attracts applicants from all over Ireland and Europe.

Letterfrack is one of many visible signs that Ireland's recent transformation into an economic powerhouse is playing out in the realms of architecture and design. Young architects and industrial and graphic designers, most of whom would once have left the country to pursue their careers, are studying and setting up shop in Irish cities, winning major commissions and turning Ireland into a center of world-class design.

Deyan Sudjic, the architecture critic for The Observer in London, attributes the new "Irish presence" in design not just to the economic boom itself, but to a "cultural confidence" born of it. The evidence of this new mood is accumulating all over Ireland, and beginning to spread beyond the country's shores. Last July, the Glucksman Gallery in Cork, a graceful new oak, glass and limestone building by O'Donnell & Tuomey, was nominated for the Royal Institute of British Architects' prestigious Stirling Prize. A month later, a huge new Habitat store, an Irish franchise of the European chain, opened in Dublin, showcasing Irish-designed furniture along with the usual Habitat line.

This year a major arts center by Grafton Architects in Dublin, featuring a luminous marble mosaic facade, will open in County Meath, and at the foot of the Great Pyramids in Egypt, construction will begin on a $335 million museum, conservation center and conference center by the Dublin-based Heneghan Peng Architects, who beat out some 1,500 other applicants in one of the largest architectural competitions ever.

Even the country's design establishment seems to have been caught by surprise by the pace of change.

"The number of designers being produced today doesn't meet the demand," said Colm O'Briain, the director of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. The National College is Ireland's premier design school, but even there, design became a significant part of the curriculum only in the 1970's, and the school is just on the verge of increasing its post-graduate design programs from 16 students to more than 50.

"Visual culture thrives on wealth," Mr. O'Briain said simply.

For all their newfound confidence, Ireland's young architects and designers are having to contend with the lack of any national design legacy to work from. The most famous 20th-century Irish designer was Eileen Gray, and she spent her life in France.

"We haven't had a visual culture," said John Tuomey of O'Donnell & Tuomey, who remembers searching for the "soul of Irish architecture" with his partner, Sheila O'Donnell, when they started their practice. In the end, all they could come up with was the striking but simple image of "buildings standing starkly on the landscape, like figures in the rain."

Charles O'Toole, the designer behind Charles Furniture, which sells pieces through the new Habitat store, said he has faced the same challenge in his work. "There aren't national design precedents here, as there are in places like Denmark or Italy," he said.

And Richard Seabrooke, the creative director of a Dublin graphic design group called Dynamo, said that in the absence of such a cultural patrimony, there has been a longtime tendency to embrace cultural clichés.

"We're still finding our way away from the Celtic-Riverdance thing," he said.

Mr. Seabrooke, 32, who favors hoodies in street-art-inspired patterns and Diesel jeans, designs packaging and corporate logos, and has recently been doing on-screen graphics and animation for new Irish television stations like City, a Dublin channel that started last year, and Channel 6, a national channel that will start broadcasting in March. Believing a more cohesive social scene will help the country's graphic and industrial designers forge a distinct aesthetic style, he has created a Web-based magazine, Candy, that highlights the work of young designers and artists, about half of them Irish, and has started holding events every two months with speakers like the Dublin graphic designers four5one, best known for their U2 album covers.

Young architects in Ireland have a bit more of a history to build on, thanks in part to Ms. O'Donnell and Mr. Tuomey, who were among a generation of architects who returned to Dublin in the 80's after working abroad, drawn not by the still-moribund economy but by a new cultural and political progressivism.

Twentieth-century Irish building up to that point had been heavily influenced by the architecture of corporate America, but the new returnees were more interested in the ideas of Europeans like Aldo Rossi, who were focused on responsible urban planning. Several young firms, including O'Donnell & Tuomey, participated in the government-sponsored Temple Bar project in 1991, which produced architecturally adventurous buildings that helped turn that dilapidated medieval neighborhood into a cultural hub of Dublin.

A decade-long economic boom and the resulting urban sprawl have again shifted the country's architectural priorities. Raymund Ryan, an Irish critic and curator now working at the Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, says that the challenge facing young Irish architects is no longer the inner city, but the suburbs.

Mr. Ryan added that Irish architecture is still informed, if not by an Irish "soul," then by "a notion of memory and narrative" - as in O'Donnell & Tuomey's Letterfrack project, which kept the brooding reform school building in place even as it surrounded it with sloping modern structures. But he sees an equally powerful influence in the globalization exemplified by "comfortably international" firms like Heneghan Peng Architects, which was based for a time in New York, is building in Ireland, Egypt and Britain, and has a principal, Shih-Fu Peng, who was raised in the United States and Asia. Even Irish architects who have remained abroad are contributing to the country's globalized design culture: the Royal Institute of British Architects' award for the best small building by a British architect in 2005 went to a sharply angular house in County Cork designed by Niall McLaughlin, an Irishman based in London.

One often hears the refrain "everything is global" from architects and designers, including Mr. Seabrooke. "We are European," said Leo Scarff, a furniture designer and a co-founder of a low-cost plywood line called Jist. "I don't see the point in trying to develop a modern Irish style." Even John Tuomey calls his search for the soul of Irish architecture "a completely false quest, like nationalism, just out of date."

The dominant aesthetic style among young designers, which might best be described as Irish-inflected European, is embodied in the work of Tom de Paor, a 38-year-old architect whom Shane O'Toole, the architecture critic for The Irish Times, has called a "white-hot talent." Mr. de Paor built the pavilion for Ireland's 2000 debut at the Venice Architecture Biennial by stacking manufactured peat briquettes into a blocky structure. Mr. Ryan, who curated the event, described Mr. de Paor as "comfortable playing with Ireland's insecurity toward the past."

Last year, Mr. de Paor completed two underground houses, dug into a lot behind St. Nicholas of Myra church in Dublin, built soon after Catholic emancipation in the 19th century. "During the excavation," he recalled, "we discovered the site had been a burial ground in a 16th-century cholera epidemic." The houses, lighted naturally from above, are essentially buried in a graveyard.

The houses' spare, elegant concrete and tropical hardwood interiors, ambiguously European in style, are hidden behind an unmistakably Irish facade: an old stone wall that runs along the lot's edge, punctuated by modest wood doors and large panes of mirrored glass that reflect neighboring buildings.

As John Tuomey puts it, "People used to worry that the global would destroy the local, but in fact, the global helps the local to untrap itself."

Trend: Xbox Influences Car Design

Video games have become so realistic, some say, that it can be hard to distinguish between actual life and virtual life.

A concept car developed by Nissan North America and Microsoft blends the two worlds even more, the companies said Wednesday.

The Nissan Urge roadster comes with an Xbox 360 video-game console loaded with the high-speed driving game "Project Gotham Racing 3."

To play, a person just needs to sit in the driver's seat. The controllers are the steering wheel, gas and brake pedals, while a 7-inch liquid crystal display screen drops from the rearview mirror.

Don't get too excited or concerned. The car may never hit the streets, and the game can only be played when the car is parked.

Sound fun? Maybe for a guy in the 15-to-25 age group. That's the target market for the Urge — a guy who knows all about cars from playing racing games, but chooses something like a used pickup when it comes to purchasing one, said John Cupit, a design manager with Nissan Design America.

"They don't see anything they want," Cupit said.

Nissan conducted an online survey of 2,000 people to find out what they did want in a car.

Turns out young women are pretty happy with the cars available now, Cupit said.

But young men wanted high-tech cars that adapted to their video-gaming, iPodding, cellphone-talking lifestyles.

The young men also said that though they preferred a car, they liked the look of motorcycles better.

Armed with that data, Nissan set out to build the perfect boy toy, a task that took about a year.

The result was the Urge, which on the outside has the flashy, metallic va-va-voom appeal of a motorcycle.

The inside is fairly bare-bones — in keeping with the suggested $20,000 price tag — except for the Xbox 360 and the flip-down monitor tucked into the rear-view mirror.

Nissan visited Microsoft's campus in October with the idea of partnering on the car.

It didn't take long for the Xbox team to get hooked.

A few of Microsoft's engineers have been in constant conversation with Nissan's engineers since then, said David Hufford, who works on the Xbox marketing team at Microsoft.

"It really tapped into the primal instincts of our shared target audience," Hufford said. "That audience is looking for really intense experiences that are embodied in the Urge concept."

The Urge is still exactly that — a concept.

Although Nissan does not plan to market anything that looks like the Urge, some of its features could be used on a future youth-oriented sports car, said Nissan spokesman Fred Standish.

Nissan is to unveil the roadster at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit on Jan. 9. From there, it will take the car to more shows around the world to drum up interest.

Installing the latest entertainment gadget on wheels is a staple in the auto business. Car radios date to the 1920s.

The 1950s Chrysler offered a phonograph under the dashboard. Today, DVD players and MP3 digital music player hookups are found in many vehicles.

The lightweight aluminum and carbon-fiber Urge was designed in San Diego and hand-built by Metal Crafters in Fountain Valley, Calif.

The concept car has an open "T" roof reminiscent of the Pontiac Trans Am and Chevrolet Camaro of the 1970s, plus a folding canvas cover in case of rain.

And perhaps Nissan can address another concept as well.

After virtual racing at breakneck speeds in a video game, can drivers behave themselves on real-life roads?

"It kind of alters your reality a little bit," Cupit said. "Maybe that's all I should say about it."

Trend: High-Style Remodeled LA High-Rise

By Mimi Avins, LA Times Staff Writer

For a select group of Angelenos, the route to grandma's didn't go over the river and through the woods, but along Sunset to a 32-story Modernist block of stucco and glass built in 1964, a singular apartment house set back from and above the storied boulevard. Throughout the 1970s and '80s, encounter anyone under 60 in an elevator at Sierra Towers, and you'd assume they were visiting an older relative.

That was then. Now, paparazzi waiting for a glimpse of Lindsay Lohan or Matthew Perry leaving the condominium building might mistake an underweight Juicy Couture-clad blond toting a teensy dog in a Louis Vuitton carrier for a boldfaced name. A thirtysomething entertainment lawyer, just back from exercising his horses in Malibu, tracks dust on the travertine floor on his way to the elevator. Outside, Mamas Mesforoush, a polite young man who shuttles between homes in Los Angeles and London, hands a valet the keys to his customized Range Rover. He's just in time for a meeting with Mike Russo, the veteran contractor who's going to turn his apartment into a showplace, at a cost of $1,000 a square foot.

"Is that negotiable?" Mesforoush inquired at their first meeting.

"No," Russo replied.

"All right," the young man said. "Then you're hired."

Sierra Towers sits on Doheny Road at the western end of the Sunset Strip, where the lively commercial clutter of West Hollywood gives way to the grand mansions of Beverly Hills. The building has always had its fans, well-heeled Westsiders of a certain age who appreciated the unobstructed views from every floor and the tender ministrations of porters and attentive doormen. It isn't surprising that condos in the building have been selling for jaw-dropping prices the last few years — the cost of residential real estate has skyrocketed throughout Southern California. Yet a Sierra Towers address now represents something more than a hefty price tag: The building has acquired a cool quotient.

Franck Verhagen, a Belgian-born hairdresser, has warm relationships with many of the stylish men and women who sit in his chair at the Joseph Martin salon on Rodeo Drive. They come bearing fresh Aspen dish or such essential information as the current yachting port of choice (Dubrovnik). Then they'll ask what's new with him. Throughout 2004 and the beginning of this year, whenever Verhagen would reply that he and his partner, Martin Fassnidge, were planning to move to an apartment in Sierra Towers that they had gutted and were remodeling, the response often was, "I love that building." Some had heard the false gossip column reports that model Kate Moss paid $3 million for a condo there. Others knew that oil heir Brandon Davis and Harry Morton, scion of the Hard Rock Hotel empire, were looking in the building.

But many of Verhagen's clients knew that Sierra Towers was smokin' even before the latest crop of tabloid regulars arrived. A rash of free-spending owners combining a sense of manifest condo destiny with a contemporary design aesthetic have reinvented the once dowdy and undervalued building as a star, reeking sex appeal.

"When I tell people I'm moving there, they're so jealous," says jewelry and eyewear designer Loree Rodkin. "They say, 'I want an apartment there. Do you know anyone?' like it's some speakeasy you can only get into if you know the right person."

A former manager and friend of the famous, Rodkin bought side-by-side one-bedroom and three-bedroom apartments 18 months ago, then gutted both to create a "minimal Zen tribal" 4,000-square-foot one-bedroom haven that will be completed in March, if she doesn't make more changes.

From the beginning, the building has been home to a colorful and eclectic cast of characters: an Internet diet guru, a periodontist, a banker, directors, writers, producers, songwriters, an Oscar-winning actor, a land developer, a music mogul, wealthy widows, a legendary jockey, a hotel heiress (no, not that one), the ex-husband of a Kennedy, the daughter of a Rat Pack member and the mother of a TV talk show host, a former big band singer, the owner of a local chain of women's clothing stores who committed suicide in the early '90s by jumping from his 31st-floor balcony, one of the founders of MGM and an aging former Playboy bunny whose apartment was a gift from her married paramour, which didn't faze anyone as long as her homeowners association dues were paid. (See box at right.)

The meeting of producer and theater chain owner Ted Mann and actress Rhonda Fleming at Sierra Towers in the '70s resulted in a 24-year marriage. The late television star David Janssen and his wife Ellie and singer Buddy Greco and his vivacious wife Dani lived there in the '70s too. Observant neighbors were aware of David and Dani's affair before any gossip columnists. The lovers divorced their respective spouses, married and moved out of the building.

But there has never been so much activity and enthusiasm for creating luxurious homes in the sky as Sierra Towers has experienced since the beginning of this century. Five floors down from Rodkin's condo, the home of Irwin and Lynne Deutch occupies the same footprint as her masterwork in progress. The view that forms a backdrop for the Deutchs' dining room includes nearby green hillsides, the Getty Museum beyond and on a clear day, the Pacific. A spacious living room, media room and the apartment's only bedroom overlook the city, a panorama that's especially dramatic after nightfall, when the stars above and lights below twinkle.

The Deutchs bought the apartment six and a half years ago from George Hamilton, who left behind a lone bottle of suntan oil on the terrace. Mirrored walls that had reflected a pair of towering elephant tusks were also Hamilton's legacy, so Alison Spear, a Miami architect who had designed a pied-à-terre in New York for the Deutchs, was hired to transform the apartment into a loft-like space that would showcase their art collection and honor the views.

It took two years to pave floors with Lagos Azul limestone, construct room dividers of Australian walnut, enclose the kitchen in glass, install a state-of-the-art lighting system and conceal window shades controlled by timers in the ceiling. The result is a sleek, sophisticated apartment that echoes the simplicity of the building's architecture. God is in the details: The headboard in the master bedroom is recessed; if a door handle protruded, a cavity was carved into the wall to match it, so that the door lies flush when open.

"The Deutchs were really the front-runners," says Linda May, a Realtor who moved to Sierra Towers in 1990. "They were the first people to hire an internationally recognized architect to redo two apartments at such a high level. They took a leap of faith."

Russo, the general contractor who first refurbished a Sierra Towers unit 28 years ago, jumped with them. He is now such a familiar presence that he's rather like the building's unofficial mayor. He figures he's worked on 120 of the 148 apartments there, and redone some four times. He's currently involved in five major projects, including Mesforoush's and Rodkin's, and on a typical day 60 to 70 of his employees are at work high above Sunset Boulevard. A year and a half ago, he was so busy supervising 12 apartments in various stages of completion that he couldn't take on any more, even Matthew Perry's.

"For years, we'd just change a few things in a unit," Russo says. "There was a lot of old money in the building, people who weren't into design or doing everything over. If someone spent $200,000, that was a lot. I was so tired of doing the same thing over and over — putting in crown molding, new drapes and new cabinets — that I was ready to retire. Then younger people started moving in and gutting everything. The typical unit I work on now costs $1 million to redo, and it keeps going up. The building is built really solid, yet it was a sleeper for so many years."

The costliest of Russo's makeovers was $2.5 million, but that record could be broken soon, since fixing up apartments has become a competitive sport. "Every new owner has seen what's been done before, and they want theirs to be the flagship," he says. Four years ago, only five apartments had been combined with another to create bigger units. Now the number has risen to nine. Each floor contains six apartments, and for the first time, three units — the whole front of the 18th floor — will be gutted and combined into one apartment for real estate executive Charles S. Cohen.

Sierra Towers is so much taller than other buildings in the area that through the years, urban legends were spun about who was paid off by whom to get approval to build the high-rise at the edge of a neighborhood of houses. Residents still mention being able to walk out the door and be surrounded by homes as one of the building's most attractive features.

The L.A. dream had long been to own one of those houses, with a yard and palm-sheltered pool. (And maybe a guest house and cabanas.) The prevailing view held that apartment living couldn't match the appeal of a house surrounded by the wide open spaces. Even for apartment lovers, in the 1980s and early '90s, new condo buildings built on a Manhattan-like strip of Wilshire that became known as "the corridor" eclipsed Sierra Towers. The apartments in Westwood were newer and larger, and offered the latest kitchen bells and bathroom whistles. A Sierra Towers unit that hadn't been updated since the '60s looked shabby in comparison.

But not to Russell Filice. A Realtor used to high-rise living in San Francisco, he was 36 when he moved to Sierra Towers four years ago. When owners who had lived in the building for decades died or moved away, he targeted a young crowd lousy with disposable income, "a young, sexy, hip clientele that's out there with no place to go," he says. "My clients don't want the maintenance of a yard and a pool. They want a lifestyle that's similar to how they lived in college, except at a more luxurious level and with every amenity."

Publicist Jeffrey Lane has lived in 10 different Sierra Towers apartments in the last 15 years. He says, "Russ would call because he had someone who wanted to look at my unit. By the time I'd get home from the office, he'd say, 'We got an offer.' He is the whiz kid of that building. He has great architectural flair. When he shows a unit, he can envision what can be done with it. The brokers who came before were just selling a condo and that was it. Russell takes pride in the building and understands its potential."

Actor-director and architecture buff Vincent Gallo, who has bought and sold several units in Sierra Towers, purchased the two-story apartment once owned by David Geffen from Filice via a transatlantic phone call. Filice says Gallo has engaged Rem Koolhaas to redesign the space.

Mesforoush, another Filice client, drives up to Sierra Towers in one of two Rolls-Royce Phantoms, or in a Porsche GT when he's not in his Range Rover. A 27-year-old former bouncer, he says he got rich quick trading equities, and has bid $60 million to buy the Chateau Marmont. "This is the only condo building that has a young, sexy vibe," he says. "I'm going to buy up as many units as I can and redo them with a quality to the finishes that will blow every other apartment in this place away."

Verhagen and Fassnidge bought a three-bedroom apartment from Filice for themselves, but they also wanted a guest room, one of 11 privately owned suites on the sixth floor that residents use for offices, live-in help or guests. The tiny rooms sold for $60,000 a decade ago, but current prices as high as $300,000 haven't diminished demand. When Filice told them one was available, they didn't hesitate. After all, no sooner had they gutted their apartment than they were offered twice what they'd paid.

The couple hired San Francisco architect Tim Gemmel to create a gallery-like space with an office and one bedroom. They wanted an uncluttered shell to contain original Art Deco and mid-20th century furnishings and contemporary art. In deference to their dogs, Archie and Freddie, rugs of chocolate brown were chosen, and upholstered pieces were covered in brown, taupe or gray.

The pair picked a German lighting system that was more costly and intricate than even what Russo was accustomed to. Shortly before a polished concrete floor was to be installed, Fassnidge walked down Rodeo Drive from the salon he co-owns with Joseph Campbell to the Dolce & Gabbana store, where he was transfixed by the boutique's volcanic stone floor. Russo imported the stone from Italy, and the change lengthened the project by four months and exploded the budget. No sign of birth pangs is evident in the serene, seamless and deceptively simple apartment, completed in April, which owes much to the owners' eye for Modern design and the forethought that has become Russo's trademark.

Every unit in the building has terraces 8-feet wide that owners can enclose in glass or leave open to the elements, beyond glass walls. (Russo has closed in an apartment's terrace, only to open it up for the next owner.) Verhagen and Fassnidge frequently entertain on the terrace they chose to expose, which overlooks homes that dot the hills behind the building. "Sitting outside, you feel like you're in the South of France," Verhagen says. "I always thought if Doris Day and Rock Hudson had really been a couple, they would have lived at Sierra Towers."

Now, even a pair of Hollywood sweethearts would be lucky to get in. Several of Filice's clients want to buy as many units as they can. Josh Greer, a 30-year-old developer from Mobile, Ala., bunked at the Peninsula Hotel after his apartment was gutted. He bought another unit he'll quickly fix up and stay in until his first place is finished.

"It's like buying a lot that you then build a house on," he says. "By the time I'm done, I'll have spent $3 million on a 1,600-square-foot apartment. I know I could have gotten a house for that, but I wanted to be in Sierra Towers. There's Beverly Hills, there's West Hollywood, and then there's Sierra Towers. It's not a building. It's a neighborhood."

Paneling Makes a Comeback

On a farm nestled in bucolic Springfield Township, Bucks County, there's an old barn under renovation.

In one room of the barn, hemlock panels blanket the ceiling, tucked under roof trusses, which also are made from hemlock. Wainscoting, made from ancient Chinese elm, circles the room. The elm's supplier, Mountain Lumber of Charlottesville, Va., claims the wood was recovered from a cache in the Luliang Mountain region of China and is 400 to 600 years old.

''The home owner wants an old Bucks County farm feel,'' says Bill D'Arcy, owner of Builders Guild of Allentown.

Wood paneling is gaining popularity but make no mistake — this is no throwback to the 1970s. Today's paneling is light years away from what was used 30 years ago.

Gone are the panels constructed from particle board and laminated photographs of wood grain.

''No one is using the inexpensive paneling,'' says Nancy Barsotti, an interior designer with offices in New York and Pittsburgh. ''People in general are looking for a higher quality that's more lasting.'' Designers are now using rich, natural woods for paneling such as elm, alder wood and hemlock.

''Paneling today is like hardwood floors for your walls,'' says Nancy Carroll of Nancy Carroll Interiors in Allentown. ''It's a more quality material.''

Back to nature

There's probably no interior design element more identifiable with the 1970s than wood paneling. Paired up with shag carpeting (usually orange, gold or avocado colored), '70s-era paneling turned what was usually a family room or basement into a deep, dark, groovy space to hang out.

The paneling most of us may be familiar with is not actually wood. It's various forms of shiny faux wood, usually dark and of uniform width. According to http://www.onthehouse.com , home centers in the '60s and '70s stocked an abundant supply of wall paneling to meet the demand of consumers who wanted to jazz up a bland room. Paneling was also an easy way to hide a wall's flaws without having to put up new dry wall or repair plaster.

''It was ugly stuff,'' Carroll says.

As time went on, home owners realized '70s paneling sapped a room of natural light and began either pulling it out or painting it a light color.

Today's paneling is predominantly made from natural materials, such as pine, cedar, oak. Carroll recently designed a room, which had a rustic, African theme, with alder wood panels that were lightly varnished. The knot holes were deep and accentuated and extremely rustic. The paneling was used on one wall, with an interesting piece of furniture in front of it for accent.

''It was really different,'' Carroll says.

Natural materials are prevalent through D'Arcy's renovation project in Bucks County. Chinese elm and hemlock combine to accentuate the room's focal point, a large, terra-cotta-lined bake oven.

''He wants it to look like it's been there,'' D'Arcy says.

D'Arcy says the homeowner plans to use the room for entertainment.

The hemlock used in the ceiling and trusses was recycled from an old Army Depot in Harrisburg, D'Arcy says. The centuries-old recycled Chinese elm covers 2,000 square feet of floor space and 3,000 square feet of wainscoting that encircles the room. The wainscoting panels are random widths, ranging from 3 to 5 inches wide. Of course, natural wood paneling isn't cheap. The Chinese elm D'Arcy used runs about $20 a square foot.

Historical bead board

While many of us may identify paneling with the 1970s, it actually dates back much further. Wood paneling was popular in homes built in the 18th century, including Colonial Williamsburg, Carroll says.

One of the most well-liked — and affordable — forms of paneling being used today is bead board, which was often seen in Victorian homes.

''Bead board has made a comeback,'' Carroll says.

Bead board, recognizable by its tongue and groove style, was used often in Victorian homes. Bead board lends a casual look that fits into any home, especially if the homeowner is going for a Colonial or Shaker inspired interior design.

''It's a wonderful material,'' Barsotti says. ''It's very durable but you need to treat it and hang it properly and use the right materials.''

Carroll says she uses bead board in kitchen backsplashes, powder rooms, mud rooms and in kids' rooms.

''It's gorilla proof,'' Carroll says.

Bead board isn't just for walls, however. Bead board was used on porch ceilings of turn-of-century homes, particularly in New England.

According to http://www.thisoldhouse.com , bead board is available in many types of woods, but it's most often made from easy-to-mill softwoods. Bead board is also a popular choice for do-it-yourselfers.

Gunter Wedhorn, of Wedhorn Construction in Nazareth, says bead board is also available in a medium-density fiberboard, which doesn't move like wood does. It's more stable when subjected to moisture and heat so it's an ideal choice for bathrooms, laundry rooms and kitchens. Wedhorn also says it comes pre-primed so it only needs a layer of top coat. The medium-density fiberboard form of bead board is also less costly than stained wood.

Wainscoting's a winner

''I do a lot of wainscoting,'' Carroll says. ''It's fun — the old look coming back.''

Wainscoting is a technique where decorative wood panels are installed usually covering the lower three to four feet of an interior wall. A strip of molding called a chair rail runs horizontally across the top of the panels, separating them from the rest of the wall.

Wainscoting is a way to add architectural interest to a blah room, without covering an entire wall with wood.

Wedhorn says he's seen wainscoting grow in popularity.

''I do a lot of kitchen and bath remodeling,'' Wedhorn says. ''I've noticed over the last 5 to 7 years that wainscoting has become popular in bathrooms.''

Bead board is a good replacement for bathrooms where years ago shiny tile was installed up a portion of the walls.

''[Home owners] don't like that look now,'' Wedhorn says. ''The wainscoting gives it a warmer look.''

Barsotti says she often uses wainscoting to fit the period of the home, particularly for Colonial interiors.

But wainscoting doesn't just have to be for older homes.

''Even in newer homes wainscoting has never gone out of style,'' Barsotti says. ''It lends a formality to the room.''

The Mysteries of Zanzibar

Few ferry rides in the world can conjure up the wealth of expectations that arise on the two-hour trip from the verdant Tanzanian coast to Zanzibar. The name alone has for centuries endowed this region with a promise of splendor.

Standing on the boat's deck, with the sun dipping low to the west, I watched as fishermen in catamarans paddled into small inlets. As we powered farther out to sea, the white sails of dhows began to appear on the horizon, a throwback to the days when the wooden ships regularly plied the trade routes between Africa and Arabia.

We docked in the port of Stone Town, the capital of Zanzibar Island (part of what is commonly referred to as the Spice Islands) and a city of labyrinthine alleys and faded Omani palaces that is redolent of the glories of the old Islamic empires, more Middle Eastern in its feel than African. Women in full-length black robes streamed down the gangplank. A monsoon shower had swept in, drenching the port and sending everyone scurrying for the nearest taxi.

Tourism in Zanzibar and other Muslim islands off the coast of East Africa is undergoing a resurgence, despite the war in Iraq and bombings in the Middle East that have frightened many Western travelers away from Islamic countries. Stone Town, the first stop for most travelers here, retains the atmospheric trappings of urban life in Muslim cities but hews to a much looser interpretation of Islam than many places in the Middle East. So while calls to prayer regularly resound through the streets, bars and restaurants serve alcohol with little restraint.

Other fanciful indulgences abound: luxury hotels fashioned from the former manors of wealthy merchants, a native cuisine that brazenly drenches seafood in aromatic spices, and white-sand beaches just a few hours' drive from the city.

The best way to see Stone Town is to walk and, preferably, to get lost while doing so. My friend Tini and I hit the streets the morning after checking into the Tembo House Hotel, a former merchant's home right on the waterfront, and instantly found ourselves swept into the decaying opulence of the city. From the narrow passageways we ducked into the inner courtyards of old manors, pastel-colored paint peeling from the walls.

What lends Stone Town its charm are the remnants of empire, all piled atop one another and inflected by the native Swahili culture.

The Persians were among the first foreigners to settle here alongside the indigenous people. The island was colonized by the Portuguese starting in 1503 and brought under the control of Oman in 1698. The sultan of Oman eventually moved the seat of his kingdom to Zanzibar, which resulted in an artistic renaissance in Stone Town, with Arabic influence becoming much more overt in the designs of manors and palaces. In the late 19th century, the British Empire annexed the island, only to have it gain independence decades later before coming under the rule of the government of mainland Tanzania.

The shadow of the Arabian Peninsula, just across the Indian Ocean, falls everywhere in Stone Town. We made our way through the twisting streets, marveling at the thick wooden double doors with their arabesque carved lintels and large brass studs.

One narrow alley led to another, with branches veering off in all directions and plenty of dead ends. There were groups of men in white robes and skullcaps playing pool in small cafés, and cramped shops selling everything from spices to television sets to long rolls of multihued cloth. It had the same feel as Cairo or Damascus or Lahore - the urban design of Zanzibar is the same as the one imprinted all over the Islamic world.

Some of the most baroque edifices lie along the waterfront, including the former palace of the Omani sultans, which overlooks the harbor, and a towering old mansion called the House of Wonders, which has a museum of Swahili culture on the ground floor. There are surprising finds everywhere, like the pink Art Nouveau exterior of the Ciné Afrique, a shuttered movie theater in the north of the old town, along a street running east of the port.

One stroll took us to an Anglican church that stood on the site where slaves who had been brought in from the mainland were sold. Nearby was a small museum dedicated to the memory of the slave trade - two musty cells in a dungeon evoke the cramped quarters in which manacled Africans were once imprisoned after they had been marched to the coast from the continent's deep interior and dumped on ships.

At night, locals gather at Forodhani Gardens, a strip of park on the waterfront right outside the House of Wonders. Before sunset, cooks begin setting up grills and tables along the water and laying out skewers of raw seafood. You can stroll along the stalls and pick different delicacies that are then grilled in front of you by lamplight, washing it all down with mugs of fresh sugar-cane juice.

One popular attraction is a "spice tour," which virtually all the travel agencies in Stone Town run. Our guide, Fuad, drove us past the former home of the British explorer and missionary Dr. David Livingstone and into the gentle hills outside town, where sprawling plantations have been set up to grow and harvest cardamom, nutmeg, cinnamon, peppercorn and other spices. Stopping at one plantation filled with lush tropical plants, we rubbed some cloves between our fingers and sniffed it.

"This is Zanzibar's cash crop," Fuad said, "but the Tanzanian government pays farmers so little for it that people often try smuggling it into Kenya." With that, he drove us to another plantation, where we ended the tour by devouring kingfish cooked in a rich coconut curry.

It is along the coast, though, that Zanzibar is at its most vivid.

One day we took a minivan up to the beach at Kendwa, a small fishing village on the northwest shore of the island that is free of the crowds at the more popular backpacker resort of Nungwi. There was absolutely nothing to do there but laze around, eat seafood, read books and go swimming in the turquoise waters.

The beach had three or four small lodges with simple bungalows right next to each other, and the one where we stayed, Kendwa Rocks, had a reputation for having wild full-moon parties.

On our last night in Kendwa, we watched the blazing red orb of the sun sink into the ocean. The wind picked up and sped the dhows through the waters, their white sails puncturing the twilight calm.

Sleek Radiators

By STEPHEN TREFFINGER, New York Times, December 22, 2005

Q. Is there a way to replace my bulky radiators with something slimmer - maybe even invisible?

A. I'm actually a fan of the big, beautiful radiator. For something so utilitarian, it provides a wealth of character - but it can indeed take up a lot of space. You're in luck, however. In recent years, the home heating field has come up with sleeker radiators, some in novel shapes. And there are other lower-profile options for warming your home.

Several companies offer slender, wall-mounted variations of the steam or hot water radiator. Runtal North America, a Ward Hill, Mass., company, has a line of hot-water wall panels that project two inches into the room. They are made of powder-coated steel and can be ordered in about 100 colors, so they can blend in or stand out.

They also come in all kinds of sizes, some small enough to slip under a window, right, some large enough to span a wall. You can hang the units vertically or horizontally, singly or in groups. Prices begin at about $360; (800) 526-2621 or runtalnorthamerica.com.

These are hot water only, so if you have steam, your options are fewer. Runtal North America's sibling company, Steam Radiators, makes wall panels that accommodate one- or two-pipe systems, above. The panels come in heights of 16 or 24 inches and lengths of 2 to 6 feet. Prices begin at about $500; steamradiators.com or (800) 966-0587.

If bold and showy is what you're after, Bisque, a British company, makes enameled-steel radiators with a modern, industrial look. "Hot Spring" spirals like a stretched Slinky. Another, "Kitchen Radiator," has vertical rows of tubes and twin rails for hanging towels.

In New York, Bisque's hot water radiators are available through 3-D Laboratory, a renovation company. Prices begin at about $500; 3-dlaboratory.com or (212) 791-7070.

Think of the IQ Glass radiant heating system as a double-pane window with wiring and a few extra tricks. The inner pane has an invisible metal oxide coating, which conducts electricity and warms the glass. The outer pane reflects the heat into the room, and krypton gas is sealed between them for insulation. The company, based in Belgium, does not yet sell its products in the United States but will soon. Information: iqglass.com or (888) 508-6711.

For a steady, invisible source of heat, consider radiant floor systems. Plastic tubing goes under the floor, and as hot water circulates it heats the room. Going barefoot is possible even in winter, and because the tubing spans the room, you don't have pockets of hot and cold.

Hannel Enterprises, in Spokane, Wash., designs and sells systems. It says installation, easiest in new construction, is not hard if there is a crawl space with access. Prices start at about $3 a square foot; radiantdirect.com or (888) 298-6036.

For Renovators, a Rude Awakening

By Ernest Beck, New York Times, December 22, 2005

THE hurricanes that battered the Gulf Coast and Florida this year devastated communities and left tens of thousands of people homeless. Now consumers everywhere are likely to feel the impact of the storms in the form of rising prices for construction and building materials.

Many of those materials were already going up in price, but within six months things may be much worse.

Tack $7,000 onto the cost of building a typical house in 2006, according to Michael Carliner, an economist at the National Association of Home Builders. Because materials account for about a third of the cost of a new home, the increase "will have to be absorbed somewhere, most likely by consumers," he said.

And count on spending more to renovate.

"Prices are creeping up on all fronts," said Paul Winans, president of Winans Construction, a contractor in Oakland, Calif., which has added 15 percent to its bids over the last year to reflect a sharp increase in wholesale prices for materials.

Kitchen cabinets have risen 10 percent, he said; insulation is up 14 percent; finished lumber, 10 percent; windows and skylights, 8 percent; plaster and drywall, 15 to 20 percent. Materials for electrical work are up 15 to 20 percent, Mr. Winans said, partly because of factory closings after Hurricane Katrina.

Along with knocking out oil and gas platforms that supply plastics factories, Katrina shut down two big gypsum wallboard factories.

Although many oil production facilities are back in operation, the factories that depend on petroleum products are still facing shortfalls.

Ken Simonson, the chief economist at Associated General Contractors of America, a trade organization in Arlington, Va., says this uncertainty makes it likely that prices for some P.V.C. products used in home building, like insulation and roofing materials, "will remain 20 percent to 50 percent more expensive than in 2005."

Because of continuing production and delivery difficulties, cement and concrete prices are likely to surge 10 percent to 15 percent in 2006, on top of a 10 to 13 percent increase from October 2004 to October 2005, according to Mr. Simonson. And all this is before rebuilding in the gulf region gets under way. When that happens, says Mr. Winans, who is also president of the National Association of the Remodeling Industry, "it will be like a vacuum sucking up things like drywall, plywood, insulation and roofing."

Exactly how much will be required isn't known, because plans for the reconstruction of New Orleans and other cities are not final. And intensive rebuilding would not begin until mid-2006, at the earliest.

That's assuming it happens. But if it does, initial estimates suggest that rebuilding New Orleans alone would require at least 3.86 tons of cement - the main ingredient of concrete - over five years, according to the Portland Cement Association, a trade organization in Skokie, Ill.

Ed Sullivan, the chief economist at the cement association, says that spot shortages are possible as rebuilding gets under way.

"If there is a shortage, typically those who are shut out are the smaller guys who don't plan ahead," he said. "Do-it-yourselfers would face the most difficulties."

Where there are shortages, price increases often follow. "We expect rising material costs to show up at the consumer level," Mr. Simonson said. "Everyone will have to deal with them."

Do-it-yourselfers probably do not need to worry about higher prices just yet. Home improvement chains like the Home Depot, partly because they are able to make large, long-term deals with vendors, have not increased prices, although Jennifer Smith, a spokeswoman for the Lowe's chain, acknowledged that "there have been pressures."

Price increases before the storms hit partly reflect the housing boom, and partly a growing demand for cement, steel and copper in rapidly developing countries like China and India. (China alone uses about a third of the world's cement.)

Other homebuilding essentials, like plywood, have faced constraints because factories can't keep up with demand.

Surprisingly, the supply of one crucial building material - lumber - has not been hurt. In fact, the hurricanes' downing of trees with an estimated 15 billion to 19 billion board feet of timber - enough to build 800,000 single-family homes, according to the Forest Service - is expected to hold prices steady.

That is, if the downed trees can be salvaged before they rot: only about 20 percent of the wood may be saved in time, the Home Builders group estimates.

Decorating With an Ear for R&B

By Penelope Green, New York Times, December 22, 2005

THE first meeting between Laura Gottwald, an effervescent interior designer and jazz lover, and Margery Budoff, a personal injury lawyer and deeply committed audiophile, was so momentous that Ms. Budoff later had to rethink her undergarments.

It was 1995 and she had just moved into a one-bedroom apartment at Stewart House, the white brick, block-square monolith on East 10th Street in Manhattan, with Moby, an African Grey parrot; a pair of three-foot- tall, fidgety but lovely Quad 63 speakers; an assortment of amplifiers and pre-amps (heavy with tubes); and a handful of Chippendale chairs and tables (heavy with clawed feet). She also had a serious collection of vinyl - jazz, rhythm and blues, Latin and gospel recordings from the 1950's and 60's - and a huge black record washer. Curious and scholarly, Ms. Budoff was attempting at the time, she said the other day, "to just amass things."

"I was learning about antiques," she added, "and I didn't have any particular affinity for them. I just liked them because they were old."

A former child prodigy who played a piano concert series for children at the Brooklyn Museum when she was 8, Ms. Budoff has the sort of hungry intelligence that worries a fact like a terrier with a rubber ball. (In her teens, she would listen to the same John Coltrane record over and over until she grasped, "in a rudimentary way," as she described it, "the nature of improvisation over the heads of the tunes.")

When Ms. Gottwald came into Ms. Budoff's life, to untangle the antiques and stereo components and records, and to help her steer an aesthetic course, she offered midcentury modernism as a model. Ms. Budoff took to the style so enthusiastically that she began dressing to match her furniture, in 1950's foundation garments, pointy shoes and little suits.

"I thought that if I surrounded myself in everything from that vintage and wore everything from that vintage," she said, "I would transmogrify in some way. Obviously I was at some sort of psychological stage."

In any case, she had found Ms. Gottwald while looking for the rug, she said, "that would change my life." It was a 1940's powder blue Karastan, advertised in the classifieds of The New York Times by a man named Paul Fuhrman, who specialized in buying and reselling the contents of restaurants and hotels. At home with her new rug and old chairs, "I was really lost," Ms. Budoff said. She appealed to Mr. Fuhrman, who suggested she meet Ms. Gottwald, a snappy designer with a rich sense of humor.

Ms. Gottwald and Mr. Fuhrman had met when Ms. Gottwald was redoing the interiors of the Cavalier Hotel in Miami Beach; she later hired him to restore some of the Algonquin's furniture when she redesigned that hotel's interiors in 1990. (Note to Mr. Fuhrman: send up a flare. Both Ms. Gottwald and Ms. Budoff are pining for you. "He just vanished," Ms. Gottwald said.)

Anyway, Ms. Gottwald continued, "I think Paul thought that if anyone could make the Chippendale things work with that rug it would be me. I do remember saying that if there was a lot of space between them they could be in dialogue."

Or at least détente. Ms. Gottwald would arrive at Ms. Budoff's apartment, and they would push the furniture away and sit on the rug. Ms. Budoff would serve cocktails and maybe some gospel, and Ms. Gottwald served little tutorials on midcentury modern furniture, or contemporary fabric, or Murano glass. Theirs was a happy collaboration. Ms. Gottwald, who once followed Ornette Coleman around Manhattan for an entire afternoon just for fun, delighted in Ms. Budoff's music and tried to design with all the equipment in mind. Ms. Budoff, a member of three audio clubs - each an orgy of cable and component swapping - is very, very serious about sound.

She described 11 years spent with a pair of delicate Quad 63 electrostatic speakers with tenderness. "That's a speaker that broke my heart," she said. Tired of fixing them each year, she has run through a series of replacements. These days, a pair of Aerial 10T's, hulking, blond maple obelisks, are planted at the top of the down stroke in her T-shape apartment, which is where the living room is. Stewart House's low-ceilinged apartments with their dead-end alcoves flatten sound, particularly the bass end. "One of our disappointments is we were not able to make the room perfect acoustically," Ms. Gottwald said. Placed as they are, the Aerials produce the best sound possible, but only if you're sitting in the living room.

"The sweet seat," Ms. Gottwald explained, "is in the center of the mohair plush sofa by that famous 40's designer, Anonymous." (That's another Paul Fuhrman pick.)

They took it slowly - buying pieces over the years as Ms. Budoff's budget allowed. Most of the Chippendale left to make room for an Edward Wormley couch and credenza, an Eames chair and a shiny black lacquer cabinet. The rest was slid into the bedroom with Moby. "That's where we put Margery's old life," Ms. Gottwald said. A few years ago, Ms. Gottwald took Ms. Budoff to visit an elderly aunt in Ocean Grove, N.J., and to visit the flea market there. Ms. Budoff met her first vintage vacuum coffee pot, a 10-cup, double-handled Silex Delray, bulbous and alluring, which she bought for about $25.

"I walked towards it as if in a trance," she said. "I didn't know what it was, but I was determined to get to the bottom of it."

Into her apartment came a clinking army of bubble-shape glass coffee pots with evocative names like the Vaculator. The other night, there were 30-odd pots ranged above her record collection; nearly as many live in a closet. "They have multiplied like rabbits," Ms. Budoff said with some annoyance. "Now I'm trying to get rid of them."

(She has already jettisoned her 50's drag; she was disillusioned by the awkward fit of her 50's foundation garments, the bullet bras in particular, and their inability to transform her on a deep cellular level.)

Last fall, Ms. Gottwald made another match for Ms. Budoff. She took her to see Jack Fetterman, an old friend who was D.J.-ing in a bar between Chinatown and the Lower East Side. It was a frigid, weird evening, "a bad gig," Mr. Fetterman said, but his mixing piqued Ms. Budoff's interest. Mr. Fetterman, an architect who works by day at E.R. Butler & Company, a high-end custom hardware manufacturer, is also a composer/remixer of a very particular sort of midcentury lounge music (a term he would hate). It's a swanky, ambient, very orchestral sound, all vibraphones and acoustic piano. Mr. Fetterman calls it "exotica house." Aficionados sometimes call it "neo-easy listening," and refer you to its heroes: Les Baxter, Martin Denny, Juan Garcia Esquivel.

"It's geeky white music," Ms. Gottwald said with a shudder, the farthest sound from Ms. Budoff's beloved deep soul, gutbucket R&B and doo-wop. But the periods are the same, stretching from the 1950's to deep in the 1970's, when disco took over.

In the cab on the way home that evening - Mr. Fetterman lives on Ninth Street - the two discussed speakers and record washers and each found in the other a kindred spirit.

"When I heard that he'd had his Dynaco speakers since college," Ms. Budoff said, "I knew that he was not a 'civilian,' and that he, too, qualified as being from another planet."

Mr. Fetterman has since taught Ms. Budoff to D.J. -she goes by the name D.J. Mobita, in honor of Moby the parrot. They have been playing before the burlesque shows at Rififi, a bar and former theater on East 11th Street. Ms. Budoff now spins for his Internet radio program, "Quiet City: Radio in Hi-Fi," on Luxuriamusic.com.

A few weeks ago, all three sat around the 1954 Gimbels metal dinette table that belonged to Ms. Budoff's parents - exhumed and given a new elliptical bite-proof top by Ms. Gottwald (so that Moby could eat with Ms. Budoff). They all wore architectural eyewear and looked like the members of a late 1970's New Wave band. Mr. Fetterman favors a thick black frame; Ms. Budoff's frames were bright green; Ms. Gottwald's a shimmering red that matched her hair. Ms. Budoff's apartment, with its glittering silk pillows, vinyl-filled shelves, and slyly updated 50's furnishings, made an apt backdrop. Indeed, it might have been the cover of one of Mr. Fetterman's easy-listening records.

They broached a term for Ms. Budoff and Mr. Fetterman: vinyl archaeologists.

For their Christmas party invitations this year, Ms. Budoff and Mr. Fetterman have made a wreath of his old record covers and photographed it with a swirly title: "How's This Sound for Christmas?"

Feds Auction Off Corrupt Congressman's Items

The antiques and other furnishings forfeited by former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham in his corruption case were laid out yesterday in a San Diego area warehouse as if on display at a garage sale.

Which, in a sense, they were.

The handmade Oriental carpets spread on a concrete floor and French armoires propped up on shipping crates were on display for the media before they are sold to the public.

Nearby, federal agents discussed the loot with an appraiser and representatives for an auctioneer, with their papers spread over a marble-topped buffet with curved glass doors and gold-leaf fittings.

Just over a week after pleading guilty to charges of conspiracy and tax evasion, Cunningham turned over many of the items he agreed to surrender after admitting he took bribes from Pentagon contractors and a New York businessman.

The furnishings will be put up for auction early next year and the proceeds will be split among the agencies that investigated the case: the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service's Criminal Investigation division and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service.

As the wares were displayed yesterday, Cunningham's colleagues in Washington, D.C., formally accepted his resignation. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said Cunningham "violated" the trust he built during a military and legislative career. Cunningham faces up to 10 years in prison and $350,000 in fines at a sentencing scheduled for Feb. 27.

He admitted he took more than $2.4 million in bribes and agreed to forfeit $1.8 million in cash, his share of the proceeds from the sale of his Rancho Santa Fe mansion and a variety of items bought with bribe money.

Trendsetter: Ross Lovegrove

Ross Lovegrove, the 47-year-old industrial designer, has placed a bear skull and a meringue side-by-side on his studio shelf in London. The Welshman, who is inspired by the beauty and logic of nature, says the two very different objects remind him of the versatility of biomaterials.

Both are made of protein and polysaccharides, yet the skull is strong enough to stand on, while the meringue would disappear if he poured water on it. "They set my mind fizzing about packaging, waste, and the earth," he enthuses.

Absorbing reams of information from unlikely sources is Lovegrove's modus operandi. He "sucks" ideas from people and places -- so much so that he often doesn't sleep through the night. He is perhaps most famous for designing furniture inspired by nature, such as the Go chair for U.S. company Bernhardt Design, which resembles a high-tech praying mantis. But he has also created airplane seats for Japan Airlines, cameras for Olympus, and watches for Tag Heuer.

TIMELY SOLUTIONS. Linking this varied portfolio is a constant search for forms that look and feel human, and new materials to render them in a cleaner, more efficient way. The Go chair, for example, features a lightweight frame of magnesium, a metal previously unused in furniture design.

Lovegrove's distinctive aesthetic and innovative approach earned him the World Technology Award for Design this November. The prize is part of an annual ceremony presented by the World Technology Network, a global think tank and elite club based in New York City, to honor the most innovative individuals and companies in science and technology. Peers nominate the candidates and vote for the winners.

"Ross was nominated for his continual search for innovative design and his integration of environmental concerns, which seems very timely given the issues that many people are finding pressing on humanity at the moment," says James Clark, founder and chairman of the awards.

INNOVATIVE SCIENCE. At the core of Lovegrove's design ethic is DNA: Design, Nature, Art. His creations try to be as purposeful as possible. A bottle he created for the Welsh mineral water company Ty Nant not only looks like a beautiful twist of running water, but can also be crushed for more efficient disposal, and is easier for children and the elderly to hold than regular bottles.

Lovegrove is shocked by the waste in some products, such as the average pump-action toothpaste tube, which contains three times as much plastic as an iPod. This love of the natural form earned him the nickname "Captain Organic" from Los Angeles architect Greg Lynn.

The pace of Lovegrove's life is fast and furious. In the past month, he has been around the world three times, talked to Boeing in Seattle about working on the interior of the 787 Dreamliner, and met with Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake in Tokyo, with whom he has worked on cosmetics packaging in the past.

Despite his hectic schedule, Lovegrove chose to travel to California for the World Technology award ceremony because, he explains, "I think science is more innovative than anything right now." The people he met at the event -- the cancer researcher with whom he discussed nanotech, for instance -- exposed him to new ideas that will swirl in his brain until they come out in some future design.

DREAM CAR. So much travel may take him away from Lovegrove Studio in London, where he manages 10 designers and colleagues, but it gives him more time to draw. On long trips, he fills blank leather-bound sketchbooks, which he buys from one particular shop in Venice, Italy.

His latest book contains ink drawings and thoughts about avian flu and utopian and dystopian views of the world. His creations are increasingly about the bigger picture, rather than isolated products. "I am not a hit-and-run designer," he quips.

It is somewhat ironic, then, that Lovegrove's lifetime ambition is to design a car. His excited tone cranks up a notch when he discusses his latest concept -- a transparent bubble-shaped vehicle that allows drivers to see the world around them.

It has few parts (the average car is made up of 30,000 components, he says) and cuts down on noise and air pollution in a manner similar to Toyota's hybrid vehicles. The overall look is athletic, with thin wheels, yet comfortingly rounded, like an air bubble.

BIG PICTURE. Until Lovegrove finds a client willing to produce his dream, he has enough on his plate. After a few days in London with his family this month, he is off again to Milan to meet with a well-known lighting and technology company that wants him to rethink its brand, then on to home furnishing company VitrA in Istanbul, then to Munich to give a public lecture at the Pinakothek art museum.

Sitcom Style

What type of interior designer writes a book about television? Someone who once believed those weren't characters on the tube but real people. Someone like Diana Friedman.

"When I was watching television as a kid, my older sister used to tell me that if I could see them, then they could see me, too," says Friedman, 33, a freelance writer who, as a child in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan, fixated on "The Brady Bunch" kids as well as their four-bedroom, three-bath California split-level house.

Friedman's love for TV, especially sitcoms, and her passion for interior design meet in the new book "Sitcom Style: Inside America's Favorite TV Homes" (Clarkson Potter, $29.95). She serves up 50-plus years of pop culture with a picture-perfect tour through the sets of more than two dozen shows, from "I Love Lucy" to "Everybody Loves Raymond." Full of color photos and recollections of set designers for some of TV's most popular programs, "Sitcom Style" is a blend of obsession, confession and investigation. (It's probably just what Kramer was thinking when he pushed for that coffee-table book on coffee tables.)

Like lots of Americans, Friedman grew up watching TV - perhaps a little too much. Like lots of Americans, she found herself, as well as friends and colleagues, saying things like, "I grew up just like 'The Cosby Show'" or "My childhood was very 'Leave It to Beaver.'"

Designing woman

Unlike lots of Americans, Friedman spent two years hunting nationwide for set photographs and tidbits from the shows' designers to put into a book. (In case you're wondering, many pieces from these legendary shows now sit in the offices of those same designers.) She included interior and exterior photos; several of the latter are of New York City buildings from sitcoms such as "Sex and the City," "Friends," "The Odd Couple," "Mad About You" and "Seinfield." Building addresses, of course, are in the book.

Friedman emphasizes that sets are much more than a series of exterior TV shots and a collection of random props; they're carefully structured show pieces, built to unveil moods and to help actors create memorable characters. The sets breathe life into personalities, unwrapping mothers and fathers and siblings and friends so real that a child might actually believe she could look back at them.

How detailed are designers? Mel Cooper, set designer for "Seinfeld," made sure the cereal boxes on Jerry's kitchen shelf in his Manhattan apartment were alphabetized each week. "I love that because it identifies his obsessive-compulsive behavior," Friedman says. Melinda Ritz, the designer for "Will & Grace," another show in the city, used a framed Boys Life magazine cover to hint at Will's sexual orientation. And the cultured and sophisticated appearance of Frasier Crane's Seattle apartment came at a price - a half-million bucks - including Martin Crane's recliner, says set designer Ray Christopher.

Some decorators shopped at thrift shops and antique stores. Others at Sears and JC Penney. Some even rumbled through the garages and attics of relatives. The goals were to provide more realistic looks inside the homes.

Sometimes, designers had less influence in a show's set and subsequent style trend. The sunken living area in "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" that came to symbolize the apartment of a liberated 1970s woman was suggested by Jay Sandrich, a frequent episode director. Sandrich wanted a sunken area because it shortened the distance between the front door and kitchen; that gave characters easier entrances and exits.

A short story

Some sets had to disguise shortcomings. Furniture in the make-believe Manhattan apartment in "The Jeffersons" was built lower to the ground because actors Sherman Helmsley and Isabelle Sanford were short. Altering the furniture "made it easier for them to get in and out of," assistant art director Michael Brittain says.

The book does have its missing pieces. Because photos and tidbits for older shows were hard to come by, readers won't get a retro look at classics such as "Father Knows Best," "Ozzie and Harriet" and "The Dick Van Dyke Show" (bad news for those who'd like to know a little more about the placement of the ottoman that caused Rob Petrie's weekly "trip" across the living room carpet).

"There were issues of availability," Friedman says. "I had to track down so many photographs, that was difficult, and I was able to get to different family members who looked around in garages and attics. That wasn't always possible for some older shows." Friedman does explore campy faux residences, like the grass huts in "Gilligan's Island" and the one-room bottle in "I Dream of Jeannie." When filmed from afar, on a counter in Major Nelson's Cocoa Beach, Fla., home, the bottle was a 1964 Jim Beam Christmas decanter. But when the camera moves inside, Jeannie relaxes on a purple-velvet sectional sofa, surrounded by urns and lanterns.

There are pages devoted to "The Munsters," "The Addams Family," "The Flintstones" and "The Jetsons." At the same time, there's a reason why a sitcom like "Cheers" is excluded. While Sam Malone's bar contained excellent design features, Friedman wanted to stress family and the home. "It was important to me that the shows took place in the home," she says. While "Cheers" was a classic, "it didn't do anything to change our thinking in how we live at home."

Side tables and more

Tidbits from the new book "Sitcom Style: Inside America's Favorite TV Homes":

Martin Crane's striped recliner ("Frasier"), including duct tape, cost $1,500, as much as the glass-and-stone dining room table situated directly behind it on the set.

The chairs on "All in the Family" were purchased for less than $20 each at a secondhand store on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. Both pieces now rest in the Smithsonian.

The living room on "Roseanne" cost production designer Garvin Eddy $5,000 to create in 1988. The plaid sofa and side chairs came from Sears. Trophies, pillows and other knickknacks came from sidewalk sales and even Eddy's own garage.

Two programs: "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" were originally set in New York. But producers changed their minds. It actually was cheaper to shoot the Clampetts in Beverly Hills. And Mary Richards of Minneapolis was deemed a more sympathetic character than Mary from Manhattan.

Orange: The New Pink

Color is one of the best ways to turn your home into a refuge and, at the same time, make a statement. Why not stimulate your imagination and capture a feeling in the hues surrounding you?

A small home can benefit enormously by using the correct colors. The perfect shade can change the way you feel about a room, but finding the perfect shade might not be easy.

Each year the Color Marketing and Design Department at the Sherwin-Williams paint company monitors the currents and crosscurrents of color preference to forecast trends for the next year.

"One year often flows into the next," says director Sheri Thompson, as a change in popular color might mean a deepening of a hue here or an injection of a difference there. There is not an overnight shift from "right" to "wrong," but there can be noticeable mood changes that indicate a preference for one color over another.

With its introduction of a collection called Natural Living, Sherwin-Williams says that orange is here to stay.

Michelle Lamb, senior editor of Trend Curve, which forecasts trends in color and design for home furnishings, says, "Everyone said orange wouldn't sell, and they were flat out wrong."

Orange can capture the appearance of an Aztec clay pot, harvest pumpkins or turning leaves and lend a feeling of warmth and coziness to a room. The Natural Living group of colors includes Mocha, a friendly brown; the windy ocean colors of Candid Blue and Jargon Jade; deep Indigo; and Arresting Auburn.

For bedrooms and bathrooms, a palette of Relaxed Retreat unfolds with just-off-the-clothesline freshness in colors that seem as if a warm breeze could blow right through them.

"Playing clean and warm blues off each other is directional," Lamb says. "This palette has a variety of values and personalities. It doesn't go into deep colors but becomes more saturated. Some colors look luminescent. This collection illustrates the fresh way color is being used today. It's much more interesting than color has ever been in the 21 years I've been forecasting."

Dancing Green, Ravishing Coral, Jacaranda and Peach Fuzz bring to mind spas, villas and luxury hotels. Consider a little bathroom with awning stripes painted in Cooled Blue, a clear aqua, coupled with Lucent Yellow, a soft greenish gold.

In trying to find the ideal shade, do your homework, take your time, and settle only for what you want.

Buy a quart of each color that seems to be a possibility for your room. Take them home and test each in several spots. Then evaluate the effect throughout the day in natural and artificial light.

Wallpaper: Back in Vogue?

Like all design trends, wallpaper is cyclical in nature. Wallcoverings have fallen in and out of fashion countless times since the Chinese first adorned their walls with rice paper in 200 B.C.

Although wallpaper has been considered passé by most interior designers for more than a decade, it's back in vogue.

Gone are the days of gaudy floral prints or '80s borders with rows of ducks and cows. Today's selections are definitely not your grandmother's wallpaper.

With an array of new products -- from embossed and flocked to paintable wallpaper -- there's something sassy about today's decorating choices. Many designs boast bold textures and lush colors, including metallics and pearl effects. Hot colors include shades of brown, blue, red and orange.

"Wallpaper is definitely getting popular again and there are a lot more interesting selections than there used to be," said Sarah Hedgspeth, a designer with The Blue Nest on Brownsboro Road.

"People are hyped up about decorating with wallcoverings because there are so many cool choices. I think a lot of people are looking to simplify their space with clean lines and a classic look. Wallpaper can definitely help do that."

Like with most trends, Hedgspeth said, some looks are more popular in different areas of the country.

"The flocked and metallic papers that are available are wonderful, and they are the hot new trends in places like New York and Chicago," she said. "With interiors following fashion trends so much, the metallics are popular, including some that are more subtle, along with others that have a very glam '40s look that almost looks like mirror.

"I'm not sure how popular those will be in Louisville, though, since most people here have more conservative tastes in decorating."

Hedgspeth and other local designers agree that one of the hottest trends for area homeowners is embossed and textured wallpaper. There are an array of papers that mimic the look and feel of leather, linen, Venetian plaster and other interesting textures.

"Some of those textured trends can fly in a conservative market, and we have a lot of really cool textured paper," Hedgspeth said. "We have a faux suede paper that would be wonderful beneath a chair rail with an equestrian-themed paper on the top of the wall. That's something I can picture in one of the beautiful homes in Louisville."

Other unique choices include patterned grasscloths, cork wallpaper and beaded wallpaper.

"We've also gotten in some really fabulous glass-bead wallpaper," Hedgspeth said. "That's something that's really different that most people don't even know is out there."

Many Louisville area homeowners are shifting away from the relaxed style and monotones of the '90s to a colorful, tailored look by using wallpaper, said Stephanie Stegner, an interior designer and manager of Wallpaper Depot, 10530 Dixie Highway.

"A lot of people are going for a more contemporary look by using things like sculptured borders or textured wallpaper, such as papers that are embossed with silk," Stegner said.

"Another one of the biggest changes we're seeing is that a lot of customers are looking for wallpaper with a black background. That gives a very elegant look."

Embossed wallpapers that can be painted, such as the collections offered by Anaglypta, are also popular in Louisville, designers say. And they're not just for walls.

You can customize everything from room dividers to ceilings with paintable paper. For example, you can paint an embossed paper a pewter color and hang it on the ceiling to give the appearance of a tin ceiling at a much lower cost.

Obtaining a chic look can be as simple as adding a bold wallpaper or fabric to a dining room, front hallway or restroom, said Stacy Allan, marketing director for Thibaut (www.thibautdesign.com), a New Jersey-based company founded in 1886 and touted as the nation's oldest continuously operating wallpaper firm.

"A powder room, for instance, is a great place to experiment with pattern and color because usually there's not a lot of architectural detail in a powder room," she said. "Wallpaper can spruce up any space, large or small."

Thibaut's newest collection, "Texture Resource," features designs that include exotic and distinctive replications of everything from alligator, a mottled charcoal-chestnut combination, to sharkskin, a unique texture available in several colors, including straw and dark peppercorn.

Designs from this collection surround a room with rich color and a layer of soft pattern, Allan said.

"Many of the Texture Resource selections are embossed so they have a wonderful tactile quality. With such a depth of texture, they make a far more interesting alternative to paint."

In patterns, Allan said, the transition is away from the small, closely clustered designs of the past to larger, open designs that have a jolt of color.

One example is Thibaut's "Marco Polo" design from its "Great Estates" collection, which is based on 18th-century drawings that were rescaled, re-colored and rejuvenated for today's home.

A vivid color palette also characterizes "Sweet Life," another new collection from Thibaut that focuses on life's simple pleasures. The motifs are vibrant and feature whimsical designs, including polka dots, checks and daisies, along with goldfish, frogs, turtles and seashells.

With so many choices, Allan said, using wallcovering is "an easy, affordable way to really add a personal touch to your home.

"You can easily find wallpaper that is unique and perfect for you and your interests," she said. "It gives personality to a home."

Although some wallpaper from early decades was very difficult to remove, Allan said, today's selections are usually much easier to take down.

"You don't have to make a lifetime commitment to the paper, if you make sure to select a quality paper that will be easiest to remove," she said.

"The biggest key is to make sure to apply a good primer to the walls before you hang the paper. A lot of people make the mistake of hanging paper right onto the drywall in new homes without even painting or priming the walls. That's when you run into trouble when you try to remove it."

With its durability, most wallpaper can last for years.

"We've seen wallpaper hanging in historic homes, and it has been there for decades and still looks fine," Allan said. "As far as home decorating goes, wallpaper is here to stay. And it will stay on the wall as long as you want it to, if it's hung properly. Yet, if you want to remove it and try another look, that's usually easy to do too."

Hotels Set Style Trends

By Michael S. Rosenwald, the Washington Post

Jennifer Candotti's husband recently gave her a gift: a quiet night away from him and their baby in a nearby hotel.

"It was such a great night," she said. "I was by myself. I was so, so comfortable."

The next morning, she reflected on what made her feel so cozy - the feather-bed mattress pad, the down comforter, the feather and down pillow, the 300-thread-count sheets and even the bed skirt, because it matched so nicely. Ultimately, her stay produced sensations associated with royalty. "I just didn't want it to end," she said.

It didn't have to. Candotti went back to her home in Brookeville, Md., and did something thousands of hotel guests now do every day: She logged on to the hotel's Web site and went shopping. She ordered, for $1,500, just about everything her body touched. By the end of the week, she had the goods, which she used to turn her guest room into a hotel at home.

The days of hotel guests stealing Ritz-Carlton towels may be on their way out. Now, guests often just buy the room or even the lobby - the shower curtains, the lamps, the carpet, the chairs, the chaises, the desks, the beds, the bedding, the soap, the dishes, the flatware and the pricey artwork on the wall. The hotels sell all of this in an effort to tap into the dreams of the American consumer, who already has been rapidly trading up to other high-end products, such as $60 bottles of vodka, $200 designer jeans and pricey chocolate.

"Hotels are probably the best design showrooms for beds and home furnishings that exist right now," said Ross Klein, president of W Hotels, a division of Starwood Hotels. "People can experience luxury with us for a night or two, then decide what they want for their home. You know, it's awfully hard to spend the night at Bloomingdale's."

Among the furnishings being bought and sold are Marriott's red acrylic teardrop lamp ($190) and Kashwere Chenilla chaise ($1,795). From Westin Hotels & Resorts, guests can buy a California king-size bed ($1,450) and the Heavenly shower curtain and liner ($35). The W Hotel has acrylic I-beam side tables ($290 each). The Nine Zero Hotel in Boston is offering a Macassar veneer desk ($3,600), a pair of wall sconces ($2,400) or an 18- by 18-foot area rug from the lobby ($14,000).

For many guests, staying at a fancy hotel is an introduction to sophisticated interior design and how it can translate to living a certain lifestyle, said Joanne Kravetz, who chairs the interior design department at the Art Institute of California in Los Angeles. They check out of the room but keep a lifestyle - of the hip, urban W Hotel or the clean and modern Marriott or the cosmopolitan haven of Boston's Nine Zero.

"The hotel has now brought that lifestyle into your realm of reality," Kravetz said. "You can have this. There's no barrier in between. You don't need a decorator. You don't need a designer. And for the hotels, this is just another way for you to plunk down some money and have what you want if you want it."

Direct-to-consumer hotel- merchandise sales topped $60 million last year, according to Hospitality Design magazine, and industry observers think that figure will grow quickly, with several companies popping up to market and sell furnishings for hotels, which then can focus exclusively on guests.

Already, W Hotel in New York has taken the trend further, opening a store in Manhattan where guests can buy furnishings right off the shelves. Westin recently began selling its custom-designed Speakman dual shower head - five adjustable jets, ranging from light mist to massaging needles - through Nordstrom. Price: $130.

"The interest in our furnishings has just been overwhelming," said Thomas Holtmann, the operations manager at Nine Zero, where rooms run upward of $400 a night. "Hotels used to be a nice home away from home. Now, guests feel like they want to take our ideas home with them."

How did this happen? Hotel observers say the boom probably has its roots in the late-1990s emergence of boutique hotels, particularly the cool but affordable properties designed by Ian Schrager, of Studio 54 nightclub fame.

Boutique-hotel popularity cut into the bottom lines of big hotel chains, which for years had concentrated on consistency of furnishings, ignoring design to increase functionality. Only recently are the big chains catching up by launching broad redesigns of their brands and rooms. New Marriott rooms, for instance, have granite countertops in the bathrooms, rich wood interiors, ergonomic chairs and the latest in luxury bedding, right down to the $155 duvet cover that Maryland resident Candotti purchased for her home.

Now, industry observers say, the hotel world is all about lifestyle décor, which, from a sales perspective, dovetails seamlessly with the aspirations of the American consumer willing to spend a little more to live the good life. With less than 6 percent of the population using interior designers, the hotels have plenty of room to serve as arbiter of chic home styles.

"This is for a segment of the population that can afford to stay at a really nice hotel, just not every weekend," said Sarah Bates, vice president of Hoteluxury, a company that is selling boutique-hotel furnishings to the masses. "It's a special occasion for them, a little slice of luxury, which now they can feel every day right in their own homes."

But much of the furnishings and bedding in hotel rooms is custom-made for hotels and, therefore, difficult, if not impossible, to find where one normally might look. "I looked all over," Candotti said. "Bed Bath & Beyond. Linens 'n Things. I couldn't find the same stuff. Nothing was quite right. Nothing was as good as what was in the hotel."

So she went to Marriott's Web site and bought it.

The hotel chain contracts the work to acquire the products and maintain the Web site through a company called Hotels At Home. In Nine Zero's case, the boutique hotel was the first customer of Hoteluxury, a Boston company. Hoteluxury sent a team of photographers into Nine Zero for four days.

"We photographed everything in the public spaces - wineglasses, cutlery, sconces, furniture," Bates said. "Everything in the hotel that a guest might naturally want. Then we worked with the interior designers to find the sources for all the products. We set up vendor relationships with them and contracts to sell their products."

Some hotels decide what to sell based on what guests try to steal.

"You know how Mary Poppins has that carpet bag and pulls out a bird cage?" asked Klein, the W Hotel president. "You'll be amazed what people still try to steal from hotels. We had a guest walk out of our Union Square (New York) property with a 60-inch leather-wrapped lamp. I don't know how he did that, but we were happy to add this to the guest's bill, and we knew we had to add it to the catalog."

Doug Rucker's Rules for Living

"Houses should be of their time and of their place. Indigenous houses — native to the area — are timeless houses."

"Because we're in Southern California with its wonderful views, I visualize my houses as basically glass, with the solid parts being the cabinets, the closets, the walls to the bedroom and bathroom."

"Houses need protective overhangs for generous glass areas to save cooling bills, prevent interior deterioration, cut glare."

"A California indigenous house is in concert with the site. It sings the same song. It faces the right way, it yields when the land yields, it juts when the land juts, it blends, flows, capitulates. It loves the site and is married to it."

"The indigenous house should be made of the fewest possible materials in order to create a harmony of structure. The less simple it gets, the less powerful it gets."

"Houses should be thought out in every detail. Details are what make it work."

"A house should be built of real materials: wood, bricks, stucco, tile, glass."

"A house wants to be optimistic. Natural wood and off-white are two of the most optimistic colors."

"Everyone is happier in harmony. Eliminate all that creates disharmony. Fill your house solely with what you love."

"To create harmony, think of design within the context of the next largest entity. That is, an accessory such as a lamp should be selected considering the furniture. The furniture should be selected considering the room as a whole."

"Living in a conflicted house, like living with a conflicted person, is difficult. A conflicted house may have one of the following: inconvenient floor plan; minimal storage; poor light [or] heat; steep, narrow stairs; bad flow."

"I think of a house as an integrated part of a total environment for living. That includes all the property, lot-line to lot-line. There should be an integration between the landscaping and the house, with no sense of demarcation."

"Every indoor room should have its own outdoor space. It's a wonderful way to increase the apparent size."

"A California house should have a semi-enclosed outdoor transition space that will make your passage from jungle to home and from home to jungle a relaxing experience. Our climate allows for it."

Trendsetter: Doug Rucker

By Barbara King, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

DOUG RUCKER puts on his baseball cap, slides open the back door of his house and heads toward his architectural office just a few steps off the patio. OK, then, his wife decides, time for her to get back to work too, and off she goes out the front door and down a high, rounding driveway to her art studio, clutching a mug of hot tea.

Standing before a wall of windows, Rucker flips through a set of meticulously detailed blueprints for Kris Kristofferson's new house, relatively chaste in size at 2,000 square feet, but capacious compared to his own. For 10 years, he and Marge Lewi-Rucker have lived comfortably and contentedly in a three-room structure that is just over 700 square feet.

Thirty years ago, on a dance floor in Malibu, Rucker, a residential architect, and Lewi-Rucker, an artist and therapist, both in their 40s and each in longtime, collapsing marriages, "finally found our real loves," as he describes their meeting. By 1984, they had left behind their respective former lives, their big houses and the bulk of their belongings to be together.

If living in tiny quarters was what made the most sense at their ages, then that was that, they would do it. Scrap the plans for the larger house along with the dismaying mortgage they hadn't expected, then downsize, pare down, let go — whatever handy jargon you want to ascribe to it — and make a go of it.

After his divorce, with his split from the sale of the house he had designed and built on a Malibu promontory, Rucker managed to buy an acre of rural property choked with waist-high mustard weeds off Kanan Road, 1,700 feet up in the Santa Monica Mountains.

"I got as close to Malibu as I could afford," he says.

Even today, with the landscape immediately surrounding the house cleared of its tangle of wildness, and a decomposed granite lawn just outside the front door raked in serene Zen-like patterns, the place has the aura of an outlying region you might stumble upon on an exotic trek.

Rucker drew up plans for an 1,800-square-foot house, but by then, he and Lewi-Rucker were in their 50s and realized they couldn't take on 30 years of hefty monthly payments.

Instead, Rucker built a 500-square-foot workspace for himself with built-in furniture, expanding it a year later with a bedroom and bathroom addition so Marge could move in.

For nine years, until he built a separate 550-square-foot office, Rucker worked at a draft board in the living area. "Returning from work was easy," says the easily amused Rucker, laughing in his quick, vigorous way. "I'd turn off the lights and walk across the room to the couch. I was home."

Rucker also put up a prefab greenhouse studio for Lewi-Rucker near the entry to the property, where she could create her Prismacolor drawings. To filter the sun, he lowered the floor of the makeshift art studio and suspended a shade cloth over a metal framework he designed from chain-link railing; Lewi-Rucker made panels for the ceiling out of foam board that she covered with silver-painted tar paper.

There's a built-in bed where they sleep when they have guests, who sleep in the house on the other built-in bed that calls to mind a berth on a schooner.

Two people can only pull off the tricky business of living in a condensed manner if they're willing to make a stoic assessment of what they can and can't hang on to and to be vigilant about organization.

"I tell all my clients to make three piles: the throw-out pile, the maybe pile and the keep pile. The keep pile is what tugs at your heart," says Rucker. "Then I tell them to toss piles one and two. If you have of lots of 'maybe' stuff, you'll feel like a maybe person. Surround yourself only with things you love."

The Rucker rule: Bring into your house only those things you absolutely do not wish to be without. You'll feel a lot better. Throw out that unsightly chair, get rid of clothes you don't wear or items that are only marginally satisfying, give away books you've read (unless you love your library, in which case make a beautiful one). Eliminate all that creates disharmony. A harmonious house contributes to a harmonious life.

Both Rucker and his wife have everything they need, they insist, and more important, what they really want: pictures of their children (she has four, he has three), his mother's books, his five volumes of a self-published autobiography (two more are on the way), "special little tchotchkes" her children made, the easel her father, a painter, brought back from his days in Paris, the drafting table used by her father and also her mother, a children's book illustrator, movie videos and CDs they store in the built-in cabinets. (Built-ins are everywhere, and key to living small.)

"I'm not that attached to things, anyway. I'm more drawn to dancing, music, reading, my work, nature," says Lewi-Rucker, taking a sideways glance out the window toward the limpid sky brushed with loose, vapory clouds.

Having, as they do, doors and windows opening from almost every direction onto thick clusters of chaparral, the exaltation of steep mountain ranges circling all about, the lawn rising and falling on various levels, they escape the claustrophobia that, say, a city apartment of the same size might engender. A feeling of expansiveness takes over.

"We don't feel we've been denied," adds Rucker. "I had already lost everything once before when my first Malibu house burned down in the fires in '70. It looked like a pile of steel spaghetti on the ground. It was a total houseclean. But I felt strangely liberated. Possessions possess the possessor. If all of a sudden you don't have anything, then nothing owns you."

Since 1958, when the Illinois native set up his one-man architectural office in Southern California, he has designed more than 200 residences in the Malibu area — all unmistakably what computer systems engineer Ron Munro, a two-time client, refers to as "a Doug Rucker." Instantly recognizable but never formulaic.

By that he means, in part, liberal use of floor-to-ceiling glass softened by overhangs, liberal use of warm woods, post and beam construction, unusual sensitivity to the site and to the personalities of the inhabitants, a flawless fusing of indoors and outdoors, a sense of contained drama without the staginess of the architect-in-need-of-applause.

Rucker gets out of the way, just as he intends his houses to get out of the way of the inhabitants.

"A house has to stay in the background and not compete with the owner for attention," says Rucker. "It shouldn't be an excuse for the architect's ego. In a trophy house, the house is the thing and not the people. In my architecture, the people are the thing and the house is the backdrop. I could design a structure that looks like a gorilla lying down. It would be good publicity, but it wouldn't be a good house."

Rucker, says Louis T. Busch, a Malibu Realtor for 56 years, is known not just for the beauty of his houses, but for their function. "He makes houses livable. Some architects miss the point. They don't do a good job of taking advantage of the view, or taking into account your real needs, like closets. He does it all very well."

After 47 years of envisioning residences, Rucker's passion and energy for his work — as distinctive, as appealing, as fresh as ever — is undiminished, his philosophy for what makes good architecture, and for how we ought to live, unwavering. He is emphatically immune to architectural fads.

A house should be indigenous, he maintains: of its time and of its place. All those still-proliferating borrowed styles you see here — Mediterranean, Colonial, Provincial, Tudor, Roman Villa, Spanish Revival — are not regional, he points out, and most are bad facsimiles of buildings meant for other ages, other places and other climates. In short, they don't belong here.

"We're in Southern California in 2005," Rucker says and pauses, as if that has said it all. "New houses that import styles from another time and place betray the imaginative possibilities of the present day. We sell ourselves short by not building our buildings. We've missed our opportunity to make our own character."

A house should also have integrity, and the source of that integrity, he says, is "to have integrity in your person."

Quality, not quantity. "A 20,000-square-foot house is a tremendous slap in the face to the whole environment." Real, not fake. "I won't build houses of false materials. Real architecture makes good ruins. Fake buildings become rubble and dust that blows away."

In a no-nonsense "Doug Rucker," what you see is what you get. No linoleum made to look like tile. No glued-on Styrofoam beams made to look like wood. No plasticized countertops made to look like marble. No stamped concrete made to look like cobblestone. "A house has to know what it is."

Rucker is given to speaking of structures and materials in anthropomorphic terms, as if they were living, breathing, cognizant beings: "Stone likes to be on the ground. It gets nervous and unsettled the higher it gets. Wood loves to be high too, because it was once a tree. Wood does not like to be painted. It likes natural finishes. Brick does not like to be painted. It wants to be brick. Lay brick as a patio and it will thank you every time you walk on it. Stucco and drywall love to be painted. They are unhappy and incomplete when they are not. They mate with paint for life, like ducks and geese."

But he is just as inclined to be plain-spoken. "I treat houses basically as a shelter. The chief purpose of a house is protection from the elements, even if the elements are as mild as here in Southern California. It's also a place to put your stuff, as George Carlin says."

The biggest mistake architects and clients make, he says, is not thinking of architectural design as a total environment for living. Landscaping is part of the design, lot line to lot line. There should be a soft interplay between indoor and outdoor, and every room should have its own outdoor space.

"He put windows in my garage. I never had that before," says client Carolyn Craft, a retired teacher. "Everything Doug does is thought out, beautiful, simple — cabinetry, his use of space, glass walls, beam ceilings. I lie in bed and just stare at my ceiling. You can always tell a Doug Rucker house. It's like walking into peace."