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"View Slideshow\n\nHere's a Will &amp;amp; Grace,\" says James Burrows. \"There's a Frasier. I've got a couple of Cheers around here somewhere.\" The veteran television director is rooting around his 2,000-case wine cellar, looking not for tapes or DVDs of his hit sitcoms but for bottles of wine commemorating those shows. He pauses to examine a rack of vintages wrapped in colorful tissue paper. \"These are the wine bottles that travel around Hollywood. You get one as a gift, and then you give it to somebody else as a gift.\"\n\nHe would know. Over the last three and a half decades Burrows has directed some of the most celebrated shows in television history. In addition to Cheers, Frasier and Will &amp;amp; Grace, he helmed countless episodes of Friends, Dharma &amp;amp; Greg, Taxi, The Bob Newhart Show, Rhoda and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, among others. (He's still directing, bucking the trends toward nonlive programming and so-called reality shows with his work on Gary Unmarried, a CBS series about a divorced father of two teenagers.) Burrows has won 10 Emmys and been nominated for 42 more. And the ample spoils of his career include an art-filled Bel-Air manse boasting what must be the only wine cellar in the world illuminated by a Dan Flavin light sculpture.\n\nUntil a couple of years ago the director and his wife, Debbie, lived nearby in a 1930s Georgian Revival residence (see Architectural Digest, July 1997). They loved the place but were interested in greater privacy, and after much looking found a four-acre property at the end of a driveway as long as your average airstrip. The house itself was a Mediterranean-style pile, built a decade or two earlier\u2014back, in any case, when more was more. \"There was a lot of concrete, a lot of marble and a lot of gold,\" reveals Debbie Burrows, curled up on a sofa in what is now a decidedly understated living room. \"But it was the most interesting one for us because of the land.\" By \"us,\" she means not only herself and her husband but also their longtime interior designer, Michael S. Smith. Smith, who also decorated four getaway residences for the pair, helped them select their permanent home. \"A lot of houses from the '80s and '90s were built in a kind of spec way, and this was one of those,\" he admits. \"But it was a good-scale house with good grounds, so we decided to up the level of architecture.\"\n\nSmith enlisted architect Oscar Shamamian, of Ferguson &amp;amp; Shamamian, to \"re-skin the house and make it much more richly detailed and correctly Italianate. It was basically like if you took a cake and cut all the sides off and redid it.\" Shamamian scaled down a monumental entry roof, added a graceful loggia off the rear of the house and replaced several tons of concrete and marble in back with a pool and pool pavilion edged by a lush lawn. Inside, a grand double staircase was replaced by a single one, windows and doors were redesigned, and more refined and proportional moldings were installed. Limestone and wide-plank oak went down on the floors; warm Venetian plaster went up on the walls; pale limestone and marble chimneypieces went over the fireplaces.\n\n\"Jim and Debbie have simple, classical, American taste,\" says Smith, who, as the latest decorator to tackle the White House, knows a thing or two about the subject. \"They don't love a lot of print, because that would distract from the work.\" The work being the paintings and sculpture that James Burrows has been acquiring for several decades\u2014a collection as quirky and sharp as the man himself. There are droll paintings by Ed Ruscha and Mark Tansey; iconic pieces by Donald Judd, Susan Rothenberg and Robert Rauschenberg; large-scale representational work by young artists like Damian Loeb and Taryn Simon. \"The trick was to figure out how to put the art in the house in a way that felt comfortable,\" notes Smith, who hit on this formula: a creamy palette; simple cotton and linen draperies; good English antiques (including a bookcase from Greystone, the old Doheny estate in Beverly Hills); soft lighting from English lanterns, chandeliers and alabaster dish lights; and lots of exquisitely faded Oriental rugs.\n\n\"Michael calls you into his office to look at rugs, and you realize he wants your firstborn,\" quips James Burrows. In fact, he and his wife\u2014who share the house with the youngest of their four daughters\u2014couldn't be happier with Smith's efforts. And although the director will soon be giving away his firstborn, the occasion is her nuptials. Which brings us back to the wine. \"I have 12 bottles of '67 Ch\u00E2teau d'Yquem,\" muses Burrows, surveying a row of honey-colored Sauternes that seem to blush in the fluorescence of the Flavin sculpture. \"That works out to three bottles per rehearsal dinner.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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