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"Charity benefit sales are a staple of polite society, but they are often the scene of the most impolite competitiveness. Not long ago, Jennifer Miller, a New York commercial real estate broker, found herself at what amounted to an upscale flea market\u2014 organized to fund a local aid organization\u2014near her family&amp;#039;s country home in Southampton on Long Island. Area residents had donated furniture and decorative works for the showhouse-style event. Attendees received stickers to mark items they wished to purchase, then lined up to await their turn to enter. By the time Miller got inside, she found that every piece that interested her had already been claimed. Some might have become furious. But Miller didn&amp;#039;t get mad\u2014she got down to business.  The person who had beaten Miller to the punch was Richard Mishaan, a New York City\u2013based interiors and furniture designer and the owner of Homer, the home-furnishings showroom. Mishaan&amp;#039;s designs are characterized by clean-lined, deco-inflected pieces, paired with colorful and eccentric accents. Miller and her husband, Seth, a real estate investor/developer, had just renovated a six-story townhouse on Manhattan&amp;#039;s Upper West Side for themselves and their children, ages 9 and 15, and were looking for a designer. At the Hamptons sale, Mishaan says, &amp;quot;I think Jennifer realized she&amp;#039;d found a person who shared her sensibilities.&amp;quot;  Miller agrees: &amp;quot;I knew Richard was someone I could work with\u2014someone who, when I visualized a thing, could make it real,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s very concerned with the way his clients live.&amp;quot; Mishaan could not have asked for a better canvas to work on. The Millers&amp;#039; house dates to the 1880s, but in the 1970s it was turned into a home for pregnant teens, and its floors were divided into a warren of bedrooms. Ogawa/Depardon Architects was hired to transform the building, and one of the firm&amp;#039;s mandates was to maximize space. Jennifer Miller grew up in Beverly Hills and had never cottoned to relatively cramped New York apartment living. Gilles Depardon and his partner, Kathryn Ogawa, began by removing a two-story addition on the back of the building, then used the space to deepen the footprint by some 15 feet. &amp;quot;Bringing in light was another big issue,&amp;quot; says Depardon. To do so, the architects essentially turned the rear facade into a wall of glass, installing picture windows or ceiling-tall sliding doors opening onto terraces on every floor. They also placed a skylight atop the stairwell and laid out airy communal rooms such as the kitchen, which has access to a spacious garden patio surrounded by slatted walls and bamboo trees. &amp;quot;They did a brilliant job,&amp;quot; says Mishaan. &amp;quot;Fresh, concise, elegant.&amp;quot; The same words could describe the designer&amp;#039;s work. To begin, he took his cue from pieces already in the Millers&amp;#039; collection\u2014notably a pair of &amp;#039;30s French cabinets with chic hardware and richly figured veneers. &amp;quot;Art deco is a very adaptable style,&amp;quot; says the designer. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a form of pared-down classicism, so it works with both antiques and modern furniture.&amp;quot; Mishaan would steer his clients toward new pieces with a similar character.  In the living room, Mishaan arranged two conversational groups. In one, he surrounded a Lorin Marsh drum table with two slipper chairs with gently sweeping frames and an arced settee of his own design. For the other, he designed a sofa with a rounded back and bracketed the piece with two Donald Deskey\u2013inspired, curved Lucite side tables that Jennifer Miller&amp;#039;s mother\u2014Los Angeles decorator Phyllis Cole Rowen\u2014designed in the &amp;#039;70s. To complement a rosewood deco cabinet, Mishaan added his own Macassar ebony\u2013framed bench upholstered in Edelman leather. Mishaan saw the dining room as a calm space with Asian notes. A lacquered Christian Liaigre dining table from Holly Hunt, with companion dining chairs, anchors the space. Playing off spicy red accents on the Liaigre table, Mishaan altered a ribbed-front sideboard from his own collection. He cut lotus-shaped door pulls into the piece and lacquered the interstices with an identical scarlet. Silk curtains with a modernized chinoiserie motif and a subtly striped red carpet complete the decor. The architects and the interior designer exceeded themselves on the top floor, which forms the master suite. Depardon devised a striking shower and steam bath that sits in a floor-to-ceiling glass pod placed in the very center of the bathroom. Mishaan, drawing on Jennifer Miller&amp;#039;s Hollywood roots, designed a &amp;quot;Jean Harlow bedroom,&amp;quot; creating an oversize, velvet-covered headboard and covering nearly every surface\u2014from walls to the rug\u2014in finishes and materials in a smart, soothing hue. What the Pros Know Richard Mishaan has an affinity for the simplicity of modern architectural spaces, but he&amp;#039;s peeved by the manner in which sleek, unembellished rooms are often decorated. &amp;quot;So many times you see poorly chosen furnishings arranged in ways that create big, impersonal voids,&amp;quot; he says. The designer has a few tactics to prevent this effect. First, he always includes &amp;quot;curved, circular or convex pieces to soften the hard edges of the architecture.&amp;quot; Second, he notes that the Miller living room &amp;quot;is a big room that doesn&amp;#039;t feel like a big room&amp;quot; because he divided the space with small, intimate furniture arrangements. &amp;quot;This breaks the room down into more livable sections and gives the whole space a greater sense of warmth,&amp;quot; he explains. To keep a small grouping discrete, Mishaan will use a single color scheme for all of the component pieces. In the living room, for example, he used the same pale wool upholstery on a settee and a pair of slipper chairs with dark wooden frames. &amp;quot;The monochromatic scheme keeps the feeling simple,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;and yet it still looks modern.&amp;quot; Click here to see the resources.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elledecor.com/design-decorate/a3897/met-home-of-the-month-april-2009-a-55619/>