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"View Slideshow\n\nTalk about curb appeal. An Andalusian-style mansion in a Beverly Hills canyon brings new meaning to the term\u2014its domed and tiled entry tower looming high above commuters threading their way through the posh glen. Even so, the impressive fa\u00E7ade scarcely hints at the wonders concealed inside. The 15-car underground garage, say, or the six bars, five aquariums, two swimming pools and one Elvis museum. There is also, in the \"this-is-your-life hallway,\" a collection of the homeowner's personal and professional souvenirs that includes a framed cast photo from the vintage (but still in syndication) television sitcom Full House. \"This is my homage to the people who bought me this place,\" says Jeff Franklin, the unassuming bachelor who produced both the show and the house. \"You can thank John Stamos, Bob Saget and the Olsen twins for this house.\"\n\nFranklin had lived in the Hollywood Hills for a number of years in decidedly more modest circumstances\u20142,500 square feet as opposed to 20,000\u2014before setting out in search of his dream property. \"What I fell in love with here was the setting, the view, the privacy and the amount of flat land,\" he explains. \"But the existing house was probably the most poorly conceived structure I'd ever been inside of.\" A half-built, vaguely Mediterranean spec house, the residence lacked a coherent layout as well as a consistent architectural style, and it more or less turned its back on the dramatic hilltop views. Franklin wanted to resolve those problems, and he had compiled a design wish list that might best be summed up as far-reaching.\n\n\"I love tropical islands and wanted to feel like I was in the islands when I was home. I love the ocean, and I wanted marine life around.\"\n\n\"It was important to me that the house in general have a warmth and coziness that isn't very common in houses this size,\" he says. \"I really wanted to use fire, water, earth, stone and wood\u2014to feel like the elements were all present here. I'd spent the last 10 years traveling around the world, so part of the marching order was to take Japan and China and Bali and Thailand\u2014those influences\u2014and work them into the house. At the same time I love tropical islands and wanted to feel like I was in the islands when I was home. And of course I live a very contemporary California lifestyle, so it had to be a house where you weren't scared you were going to break something or spill something and never be invited back. The last influence was scuba diving. I love the ocean, and I wanted marine life around me.\"\n\nThat wasn't asking too much, was it? It says much about the versatility and resourcefulness of Richard Landry, the architect Franklin turned to for help, that he was able to address that brief in a comprehensible manner. \"We decided to go with the southern part of Spain as the inspiration,\" reports Landry. \"That architecture is very suited to the resort vibe Jeff was after. How do you bring feelings of Asia in to that? Look at Spanish architecture, with its heavy carving and detail\u2014it's very similar to what you would find in some of the Asian elements.\" Landry and project architect Todd Riley swapped the pseudo-Mediterranean exterior details for a graceful vocabulary of columns and arches, volutes and finials. They enlarged all the openings and fitted them with pocket doors and wide balconies and loggias to take advantage of the views. Inside, they \"repurposed, reshaped and reconceived\" every single room for the sake of function and flow.\n\nAll of the surfaces were taken down to the studs and reworked by Franco Vecchio, a Sicily-born craftsman turned designer whom Franklin relied on to bring Old World character to the rooms. \"It was actually nice that the theme was all about incorporating different parts of the world, because it kept me from repeating myself,\" says Vecchio. \"Mahogany, teak, walnut, ebony, rosewood, wenge\u2014I had to do something different throughout. The same with the stone. There's limestone, slate, quartz, the granites\u2014there must be five or six granites.\" Throughout the house Vecchio employed Asian touches that flatter rather than fight the Spanish architecture\u2014grass-cloth wallcoverings, Buddha sculptures and Balinese paintings, an enclosed spa inspired by a tansu, a beaded-and-bronzed ceiling dome (suggested by a Buddha head) outside Franklin's bedroom.\n\nThe designer pauses under the dome before throwing open a pair of heavy alderwood doors to reveal a master suite so sensational it approaches visual overload. One balcony commands views stretching from downtown to the ocean, while another overlooks the tropical-themed pools, which landscape designer Mark David Levine has appointed with roaring waterfalls, a 35-foot slide and a swim-in \"sauna cave.\" Gradually the room itself comes into focus: another fish tank, another bar, suede walls, LED lighting behind the bed wall, a television that descends from the ceiling and rotates 360 degrees. Franklin conducts a visitor to the his-and-her dressing rooms; hers, for now, contains little more than a stack of Lakers jerseys. \"I'm a romantic realist,\" confesses the producer, who once made a movie called Love Stinks, \"just waiting to find the princess to stock it with hundreds and hundreds of pairs of shoes.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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