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"Living Rooms by the AD 100\nOur look at how top designers and architects put his or her unique stamp on one of the most vital areas of the home\nArchitect Marco Aldaco designed a vacation home, with several buildings, for a media magnate in Punta Ixtapa, Mexico. The living room in Casa de los Delf\u00EDnes employs tropical woods, stucco walls and a polished-cement floor. The painting over the sofa, which depicts birds and jaguars, is Aldaco's; he also designed all of the furniture for the space. May 2004\nInterior designer Charles Allem \"really fell in love\" with a lavish penthouse he refurbished for a Manhattan couple. Silver leaf adds drama to the living room's barrel-vaulted ceiling. Velvet draperies, hand-printed in Italy, \"never stop cascading,\" he says, from the beveled-mirror rods he designed. Working with Lacina-Heitler Architects, he also designed the monolithic Jerusalem stone fireplace. April 2007\nShakespeare Ranch, located on Lake Tahoe's Nevada shore, is the vacation home of Larry and Camille Ruvo. Over the years, the property\u2014a family compound\u2014grew to include a main barn, five guesthouses and a new lake house conceived by architect Marc Appleton. \"We wanted the house to look as if it could have been done at the same time as the historical stuff,\" he says. The Ruvos especially wanted a large-scale window in the living room, which Appleton provided by expanding the space with exposed beams and trusses. May 2005\nOn a hill surrounded by vineyards in California's Napa Valley, architect Howard J. Backen built a house for himself and his family with the help of his wife, Lori O'Kane Backen, who did the interiors. \"The main living area is composed of one large room, with living, dining and kitchen flowing together,\" says Backen. September 2004\nDesigner Penny Drue Baird remade a couple's Bucks County, Pennsylvania, retreat, embellishing its characterless interior with elegant touches. According to Baird, the living room was a designer's nightmare\u2014a large room with doors on opposite sides, small windows on two sides, a dark, low ceiling and an off-center fireplace. She anchored the room with a two-sided settee, so one group can gather in the middle of the room while others sink into the large, comfortable sofa under the window. February 2007\nEnglish yacht designers Dickie Bannenberg and Simon Rowell created stylish, contemporary interiors for Illusion, a client's 166-foot Feadship yacht docked in St. Martin. They updated the main living area\u2014\"a big, accommodating space,\" Bannenberg says\u2014with dramatic dark-stained oak paneling. July 2008\n\"It's modern Mykonian, inspired by vernacular architecture,\" Javier Barba says of a vacation house he designed on the southwest coast of Mykonos, Greece. The living room has a soothing palette of cream and white. Comfortable sofas and chairs and Greek art and artifacts are grouped before the fireplace. \"It's an airy atmosphere,\" he says. \"Warm colors accentuate the clean, light walls.\" October 2008\nDesigner John Barman transformed a large but unremarkable residence in Southampton, New York, into a beguiling summer retreat for a young couple and their four active children. The living room has garden views on both sides, and Barman arranged the seating areas so that the owners and their guests would automatically gaze outward. He used color and lighting to add intimacy to this room. November 2006\n\"We wanted the clients to live in a garden as opposed to a house,\" Bill Bensley says of the residence he designed for a couple in Thailand's Chiang Mai Province. The living pavilion is anchored by a teak low table made on-site from Bensley's design. The space is accented by Indian, Thai, Burmese and African artifacts. Sliding glass doors offer easy access to a wraparound veranda. April 2007\nIn Curitiba, Brazil, architect Marcos Bertoldi built a sleek Modernist house for his cousin Osmar Bertoldi and his wife, Maria Cristina Casagrande Bertoldi. The architect flooded the living area with natural light to achieve \"a constantly changing interior.\" He also designed the d\u00E9cor and, unafraid of introducing bold colors, covered a Le Corbusier club chair in purple fabric. July 2009\nKarin Blake designed the interiors of a home for Joe and Ami Cohen in Santa Monica Canyon. Blake, who shares the couple's love of folk art, found the vintage stop sign some time before she began work on the project. \"As the living room was coming together, I brought it over for fun and realized I really liked it,\" she says. It sits on an industrial cart-cum-low table. July 2009\nIn Italy's Umbria region, Count Antonio Bolza, Countess Angelika Bolza and their architect son, Count Benedikt Bolza, are redeveloping their large estate, Castello di Reschio, which has 50 ancient farmhouses. Count Benedikt recently renovated one of the farmhouses, called Selvatella, for a British family. He recreated the arch between the living room and the entrance hall from the original structure. In Umbria, as he explains, \"new construction is severely limited; but if you stay within the footprint of the original building and reuse original materials, as we did here, then you are free to be creative.\" April 2009\n\"The scale, volume and furnishings make the space dignified,\" Samuel Botero says of an apartment in Panama that he designed for a longtime client. Saturated golden hues prevail in the living room, which looks out to ships en route to the canal. Botero says the color on the walls\u2014gold with a hint of melon\u2014\"makes people look beautiful. I love using color to make people look good.\" August 2007\nDesigner Peter Roy Bowman collaborated closely with architects Guillermo Michel Renteria and Alvaro Gomez Flores on the plans for a couple's oceanfront retreat in Punta Mita, Mexico. In the living room, William McGill's Tropical con Flores is above the fireplace. The mantelpiece was conceived by Bowman and incorporates a pair of antique stone eagles mounted on contemporary columns. December 2008\nDesigner Geoffrey Bradfield wanted the living room in his 1869 Manhattan town house \"to be a departure from anything [he had] ever done before.\" Furniture from his Millennium Modern collection fills the room. The mirrored French doors, set into a matching mirrored surround to give them greater stature, suggest the 18th-century. The swirls of the carved rug, inspired by the metalwork of Poillerat, feel Moderne, as do the voluminous silk-taffeta draperies, which are quilted for the last few feet before hitting the floor with a huge splash. September 2005\n\"I wanted to give a look of glamour and warmth to an austere building,\" interior designer Thomas Britt says of a Tribeca structure he converted into a home for an international couple. For the double-height living room windows, he hung 22-foot-tall white draperies with an enormous swag trimmed in red. \"When you're in this room, you don't know what country you're in,\" Britt says happily. \"You could be anyplace. The d\u00E9cor is influenced by all the places I've been.\" April 2008\n\"The shiny walls glitter at night and glitter during the day, reflecting the lights of the city,\" Mario Buatta says of an apartment he designed on the 30th floor of a Manhattan high-rise. Convinced that dark colors are more glamorous than light, Buatta painted the living room walls one of his favorite colors\u2014eggplant. He then glazed and treated them with acid. \"It creates the feeling of porphyry. Eggplant is a great color on which to display paintings,\" he says. November 2005\n\"I wanted an enchanting, magical house where I could entertain friends and enjoy a paradise of gardens,\" interior designer Diane Burn says of her residence in West Palm Beach, Florida. A seating area in the living room offers \"a cozy place to converse,\" notes Burn, who brought a French sensibility to the space. November 2006\nMartin Kemp, head of design at Candy &amp;amp; Candy, used Art D\u00E9co touches and soothing earth tones to transform a town house near London's Holland Park into a space that would be both family-friendly and suitable for entertaining. The living room features a number of custom furnishings, including the hand-beaded sofa pillow and the bronze, lacquer and white-marble low table. March 2009\nTimothy Corrigan united French elegance with American comfort in a California client's Parisian pied-\u00E0-terre. In the living room, Corrigan concentrated on bringing his client's French fantasy amply alive. \"My overall idea was that the interior should look like a kind of jewel box, filled with decorative surprises,\" Corrigan says. December 2007\nArchitect Savin Cou\u00EBlle was commissioned to design a getaway for an Italian family on the coast of Sardinia. In keeping with his trademark approach, house and site are thoroughly integrated. In the living room, a banquette sits under a wall opening of the entrance hall and faces another of the architecture's wide structural voids\u2014Cou\u00EBlle's unique framing of a natural scene. August 2007\n\"The house has quite a modern sensibility,\" designer Elissa Cullman says of a couple's East Hampton home. With her associate Elena K. Phillips, Cullman employed a consistent palette of white, cream, beiges and toast, and aimed for a \"light and airy\" living room. However, alert to the danger of muted colors, they dropped in a few spots of stronger colors and introduced what Cullman likes to call curveballs. May 2009\nAn oceanfront concrete, steel and glass house near San Diego was designed by Wallace E. Cunningham to make the most of an intimate site. Unobstructed ocean views stretch beyond the living area's windows. \"Because of the shape of the space, the thrust of the beams and trellis skylight overhead, and its apparent suspension above the water, one has a sense of being on a ship at sea,\" comments Cunningham. April 2005\n\"I wanted to downplay the formality without wrecking the beauty of the place,\" Joanne de Guardiola says of her 1895 Southampton house. In the living room, she chose a subtle yellow-and-cream palette, finishes that were lightly sponged and glazed, and a restrained faux-marbre baseboard that mediates between the cream-hued wainscoting and the original fir floors. An interplay between the formal and the informal characterizes de Guardiola's approach to the furnishings. She combined casual fabrics with English, French and Russian pieces from various periods; the mixture cohabits easily in the 40-foot-long space. September 1997\nFor clients on Hawaii's Kona Coast, architect Mark de Reus and his team achieved an American Arts and Crafts aesthetic within a tropical setting. In the living pavilion, Asian-inspired furnishings stand up to massive architectural elements. May 2009"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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