But the settling-in part — the purging, the decorating, the home-making — well, these things take time, particularly if you’re a hardworking actor and single father constantly battling entropy or rather fixedly engaged in “the struggle to control my surroundings as opposed to my surroundings controlling me,” as Mr. Wong, 51, puts it.

“Because of the accumulation of objects,” he continued, “things are never quite the way I want them to be. There has always been a lack of, well, clarity.”

On a recent August morning, Mr. Wong opened his front doors (century-old bronze, from a bank in Philadelphia by way of the Demolition Depot) to two visitors, this reporter and Mr. Wong’s architect, Jack Wettling, and showed off a few victories: 70-odd pairs of shoes corralled into 32 wire baskets in a locker-room storage unit in the front hall; three spit-spot closets arrayed with armfuls of colored yarn in clear plastic bags, tidy rows of hats and suit coats lined up like soldiers, all behind doors stenciled with the ghosts of long-defunct businesses harvested from the basement of the Puck Building nearby.

Finally, in a back room, there was a vast and curious piece of furniture made from old sewing drawers, yardsticks and reclaimed wood, built by a friend to replace the massive rolling wire bookshelf filled with DVDs, photos and books that had been Mr. Wong’s nemesis for the last few years.

Mr. Wong, whose off-screen presence is closer to that of Dr. George Huang, the soothing forensic psychiatrist he played for 11 seasons on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” than Song Liling, his stunning Broadway debut as the gender-ambiguous love interest in David Henry Hwang’s 1988 play, “M. Butterfly,” professes “a profound discomfort with throwing things away.”

He saves leather shoelaces, buttons and the thread and fabric swatches you get when you buy new sweaters and suit coats. He also collects yarn, vintage grease cans, 19th-century chiming clocks, yardsticks and old sewing drawers, which he accrues during episodic eBay forays (see “curious piece of furniture,” above). He likes old plumbing valves and fixtures, vintage hardware and a good deal. He drags furniture in off the street. Things do pile up, he said.

Mr. Wong extracted an aluminum stovetop percolator from a cupboard and rifled around for the coffee to fill it for some time before giving up and phoning his boyfriend, Richert Schnorr, for help. “He’s the coffee maker,” Mr. Wong said later.

This reporter suggested that perhaps Mr. Wong had cleaned up too much, and anyway she was fully caffeinated, if Mr. Wong wanted to forgo the coffee making. “But you won’t see how this apartment is made for entertaining if I don’t actually entertain you,” he said, bustling about his bright red Aga stove. Mr. Wettling grinned and stuffed a chocolate croissant into his mouth.

EAST FOURTH STREET is Mr. Wong’s third project with Mr. Wettling. The first, a loft on West 55th Street where Mr. Wong lived with his longtime partner, Richie Jackson, a television producer, was also filled with found objects: pieces of Andy Warhol’s Factory, including office doors stenciled with Warhol’s aphorisms, as well as family treasures like a floor border made from his mother’s mah-jongg tiles. The second apartment was a larger loft in Chelsea, bought and renovated for the family Mr. Jackson and Mr. Wong were planning to have.

In 2000, the couple had twin sons with a surrogate mother, born three months prematurely. The older one, Boaz Dov, lived only 90 minutes. His brother, Jackson Foo Wong, now a healthy 12-year-old, battled developmental setbacks and health crises in a neonatal care unit in San Francisco.

The darkly humorous e-mail newsletters that Mr. Wong sent to a widening circle of friends, family and colleagues were collected in a book, “Following Foo (the electronic adventures of the Chestnut Man),” in 2003. In it, Mr. Wong details the helplessness of new parenthood as experienced through the harrowing prism of the neonatal nursery in which Jackson’s milestones — a sponge bath, a bottle feeding, breathing by himself — approach and recede in terrifying episodes.

A year after the book was published, Mr. Jackson and Mr. Wong broke up, their 18-year relationship “the collateral damage,” Mr. Wong said, of losing a child. Yet, he added, although they live apart, they are united in knowing what it means to experience that loss (“this sense of being marked forever,” he said). And in their ongoing role as parents. Jackson lives with both his dads, in an arrangement that sees him uptown with Mr. Jackson and his new partner, Jordan Roth, during the week, and downtown with Mr. Wong on weekends.

As a result, Mr. Wong said: “Our house, this place, has become incredibly important, because I felt the disappointment and shame that my son was the fruit of a broken home. I felt a sense of being broken, and robbing him of a full family experience.”

In 2005, Mr. Wong bought this apartment for $1.25 million (he thanks “Law & Order” for the paychecks that made that possible) from William Sofield, the architect of Tom Ford’s Gucci stores, who had been living there since the mid-1990s.

The two men share a personal trainer, Rob Morea, who is also, conveniently, a real estate broker. They also share a taste for underground, underlighted places like this one.

“I’m basically nocturnal,” Mr. Wong said. “This is not the place for a daylight queen.”

The space had been, variously, a sweatshop, a Yiddish theater and a pornographic theater. When Mr. Sofield moved in, he had excavated the basement room and found carcasses of sewing machines along with old sets, props and scripts. He gave it his own decadent stamp — Mr. Wettling and Mr. Wong described it as a cross between a ’70s disco and a Charivari boutique — with silvered walls, much stainless steel and a quartet of Warhol’s electric chair prints; in 2000, Nan Goldin photographed the apartment for Elle Décor. (Recently, Mr. Sofield recalled the day his mother came to visit and wound up in the Merchant’s House Museum next door. Margaret Gardiner, the museum’s executive director, phoned him to say: “Are you expecting a mother, Bill? Because there is a woman wandering around the museum criticizing the décor. I don’t know how to break it to her that this isn’t where you live.”)

It took Mr. Wong seven years to fully renovate the 2,900-square-foot apartment, because he and Mr. Wettling proceeded in stages. Also, six months into the job, the contractor vanished and it took another six months to find a new one. The ceilings, intriguingly barrel-vaulted and brick, were covered in plaster, which was removed. The back of the loft still had its wooden skylight, which was replaced with a sturdier steel one. Mr. Sofield had enjoyed the sound of the rain on the wood and glass, but Mr. Wong worried about security.

It was an unsettling period: Both Mr. Wettling and Mr. Wong’s fathers died at the beginning of the project. Mr. Wong and Jackson, who spent weekends with him, camped out in four sublets during the first three years of the renovation. (This early phase, the bulk of the work, cost under $200 a square foot.)

But when it was over, Mr. Wong began creating the sort of home life he wanted for his son. “I wanted to learn to cook for him, and I wanted him to like it,” Mr. Wong said. “I’m a single parent of an only child. I wanted him to have this sense of people around.”

We have described the bright red Aga stove. It is no showpiece. Methodically, Mr. Wong, who grew up in a family that marked the passages of life with extraordinary meals, has been teaching himself to cook. America’s Test Kitchen, home of Cook’s Illustrated, is his university.

Every Saturday night, Mr. Wong collects a dozen of his friends — the same core group, give or take a few players, including the actress Cindy Cheung, whom he directed in the one-woman show “Speak Up Connie,” and Wayne Barker, the composer, most recently of “Peter and the Starcatcher,” now on Broadway — for an elaborate meal and performance that involves Mr. Wong cooking in the kitchen while Jackson gambols with the guests.

Jackson, who sleeps in a model of an R160 subway car, takes everyone for a ride and “you can hear screaming, and sometimes he serves snacks because sometimes it is a dining car,” Mr. Wong said. There is also singing and piano playing and improvisation, and every week Mr. Wong marvels at the production.

“Jackson has bonded with all these people in a huge way,” he said. “They are all theater people and they aren’t tolerating him, they are part of the show. It’s a big deal for someone like me, who grew up the eccentric in the family, crocheting on the couch at Thanksgiving.”

Even Mr. Jackson, Mr. Wong’s former partner, is for the most part impressed with the home Mr. Wong has created. If only, Mr. Jackson told him, you could throw out 75 percent of all that stuff.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Christopher Losa freely admits to being “OCD.”

“I need to exist in a space that’s free of clutter,” he claims, and it’s this compulsion that led him, in 2003, to his present home in San Francisco. At first glance the empty loft condo seemed run-of-the-mill, but Losa had a strong vision for the space and high hopes for his new life in the Mission Disctrict. He and his wife, Elizabeth,  tired of the Beltway-driven life in Washington, DC,  moved to the Bay Area to find an environment with more cultural stimulation. Losa, an independent supply-chain management consultant for 16 years, an excellent cook, and longtime food connoisseur, dreamed of opening his own restaurant.

They opted for a loft because “it’s a clean way of living,” says Losa. “It’s a beautiful thing to come home to a space that opens up. In a way, it’s everything that ‘urban’ isn’t.”

The transplanted couple’s 1,400-square-foot unit had the usual: tall ceilings, concrete floors, large windows, no walls; “a big white box,” in Losa’s words. In order to remodel it to fit their needs, they hired Joshua Aidlin (of Aidlin Darling Design), who based his eventual design around what he calls “a generous amount of eastern morning light” that streams in from tall ground-floor windows.

Aidlin conceived a plan made up of five architectonic elements: “the cradle,” “the zipper,” “the hearth,” “the stage,” and “the scrim.” After two years of renovation, the loft was transformed into a radiant interior dotted with mid-Century treasures .

This intervention is a dense complex box that contain the kitchen, mechanical and secondary space; it divides the public and private area of the loft.

A primary feature of the box is a series of huge sliding doors that can open the entire perimeter of the loft of that can extend the exterior walls to close off bedroom.

This way you can arrange it any way you want: if you need more space simply use these doors and you will have more space. If, on the contrary, you want some privacy and want to divide it, fine – do that. You only use the limits when you feel the need to, which is great. The whole loft has hard floors, covered with big tiles or big stone plates, something that makes it a bit too cold to my taste. But if you use it for a painting workshop or something similar, then you have a reasonable point.

All the furniture is modern and very functional, with futuristic design and no trace of wood unless intended to be used as decoration like covering the door of some device. The ceiling is pretty high, so they use some big and powerful ceiling lamps that are pretty unique in style and bring an extra touch to the general design of the apartment.

The sleek, octagonal design, arguably the boldest work by the singular architect John Lautner, is considered a masterpiece of California Modernism and is beloved by cultists of midcentury design.

But the Taschens saw dirty, disco-era, wall-to-wall carpet on much of its 2,200 square feet, an old aluminum door, smudged windows and seven layers of paint on what was originally a gently austere, exposed brick wall.

Still, it was love at first sight,

says the laconic German, wearing a red Muhammad Ali bathrobe as he shows off the place on a hazy morning. The backlist of Taschen’s company — from homoerotic nudes to the original Lutheran Bible — includes books on Modernist homes, the architectural photographs of Julius Shulman, the works of Richard Neutra and the Case Study houses. Some of the titles, along with dozens of art magazines, are scattered around the house and its unobtrusive furniture.

Today, the place is serene and airy, with a simple, light-wood openness that suggests midcentury Scandinavian crossed with a ski chalet, and views that are pure Southern California.

“I bought it right away — as fast as possible,” says Taschen.

Frank Escher, who was brought in as restoration architect, vividly remembers the place’s condition.

“I have to give Benedikt credit for seeing past the disrepair and sad state the house had fallen into,” he says. “It looked like a rundown motel. It had been rented out for 10 to 12 years; it was like the ultimate party house.”

In fact, during much of that decade, the place had been on the market. “It was for sale for so long,” says Taschen, “that it was even in a ‘Simpsons’ episode: a house with a for-sale sign.”

There was no market for that house,

says Julie Jones, the Realtor in the sale, who had watched the place languish after she listed the house. “Everybody loved Spanish, and then shabby chic came in.” Midcentury houses “would sit and sit and sit — you couldn’t give ’em away. People would want to see the view, and that was about it.”

The fate seemed unjust for a structure the Encyclopedia Britannica had judged

the most modern home built in the world,

and which had appeared in Brian De Palma’s “Body Double.” It’s hard not to see the house, which sits on a 29-foot-high, 5-foot-wide concrete column over a long-considered-unbuildable Hollywood Hills site, as a hovering flying saucer or a prototype for the 23rd century architecture of “The Jetsons.”

But the 1960 house is very much a work of its time and place.

Alan Hess, an architectural historian and author of “The Architecture of John Lautner,” considers Chemosphere as perfect an expression of Southland culture as Greene & Greene’s Gamble House, Charles and Ray Eames’ Case Study house and the finest work of Neutra and R.M. Schindler.

Chemosphere was characteristically Los Angeles of that time because “it didn’t have to look like a house,” says Hess. “It was an architecture newly defined. It could take on its own brand-new shape. It displays the optimism of its time: that technology can be used to solve any problem, just as Century City and Googie’s,” the Lautner-designed Sunset Boulevard coffee shop, did. “The West would not be possible without technology: Water, electricity, everything that it took to overcome dryness and distance was dependent in some form on technology.”

Hess finds the house fascinating partly because it was built for a couple and their four children. “And yet whenever that house is used in the movies, it’s always a decadent bachelor pad,” Hess says. “You have the reality of Southern California life, and the image of Southern California life, summed up in one house.”

It’s not the only contradiction the place contains.

“From the outside it looks like a spaceship which you cannot enter,” Angelika Taschen says from Berlin, where she now lives. (The couple were finalizing a divorce at the time of this article’s publication.) “But if you go inside, it feels very cozy … very Zen and calming. Maybe because you are floating above the city, above reality in the sky. You feel disconnected from the planet and completely free and happy.”

The house is the product of a fortuitous union of architect, client, time and place. Leonard Malin was a young aerospace engineer in late-1950s L.A. whose father-in-law had just given him a plot north of Mulholland Drive, near Laurel Canyon. The land was leafy and overgrown, with extravagant views of the San Fernando Valley.

“My philosophy at the time was, most people work their whole lives to build their dream house,” Malin says from Arizona, where he’s constructing a new home. “Why not build it now, and pay for it for the rest of my life?” This was a time, during L.A.’s postwar expansion, when a middle-class client could build in the Hollywood Hills on a modest budget: Malin had $30,000 to spare.

The only catch: At roughly 45 degrees, the slope was all but unbuildable. The plot may have remained empty had Malin not approached Lautner, whose work he knew from a nearby house. Lautner, a brilliant but reputedly prickly man, sketched a bold vertical line, a cross, and a curve above it. “Draw it up,” he told his assistant Guy Zebert.

Though Lautner could appear imperious, a quality he may have learned from his mentor Frank Lloyd Wright, he was also a deeply practical and hard-headed problem-solver. Lautner didn’t see the house as a flying saucer but as a sensible solution.

However counterintuitive the scheme, it was also one of very few imaginable that allowed the plot to be utilized. And because of a concrete pedestal, almost 20 feet in diameter, buried under the earth and supporting the post, the house has survived earthquakes and heavy rains. (The house is reached by a funicular.)

“What was great about Lautner,” Benedikt Taschen says, “is that he had this dualism about nature and the city.” He says the home’s northern edge, which contains the bedroom and his office, is very quiet. “It’s pure nature, with all kinds of animals: skunks, bobcats, coyotes, deer. They are not shy; you almost have nose prints on the window.

“And here,” Taschen says, walking toward the living room window that faces the Valley’s homes and skyscrapers along the 101 Freeway, “it’s all city.”

Taschen admires the bold dichotomies the architect worked with. “That’s the characteristic of great artists: They can make things simple.”

Hess points out that Lautner’s embrace of Modernist innovation and organic forms made him a more interesting architect but also contributed to his obscurity during much of his career. During the 1950s and ’60s, the starker, cooler Modernism of the Bauhaus and of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe reigned in intellectual circles, especially in Europe and on the East Coast.

“Organic Modernism was just as modern in its use of materials,” Hess says, “but it had a different sense of space, which was flowing. The way a building was put together was like a tree or a flower or a cave — natural forms. Wright was one of the founders of that approach to Modernism, and Lautner brought it to Southern California.”

Even out-of-state critics and scholars who could appreciate the sharply angular California Modernism of midcentury didn’t know what to make of Lautner’s merging of the modern with natural forms. “So they ignored him,” says Hess, “or put him in the category of undisciplined, far-out, do-whatever-you-want California architecture.”

Escher, the preservation architect, considers Lautner “the missing link between the classic Modernism of the Case Study Houses and the work we now associate with Los Angeles — the more expressive, more sculptural forms. Frank Gehry has said that as a student, he considered Lautner to be a god.”

Unlike a lot of the more didactic and theory-driven homes of Modernists from Le Corbusier to Philip Johnson, it’s actually pleasant, most of the time, to live inside a Lautner. The homes don’t force their inhabitants into an ant farm’s existence the way some houses do. Le Corbusier called his homes “machines for living in,” and sometimes they felt that way, with their narrow hallways and rigidly prescribed paths.

Chemosphere is bisected by a central, exposed brick wall with a fireplace, abutted by subdued seating, in the middle. One side of the house is public, with a small kitchen and blended living and dining rooms including built-in couches below glass windows. The house’s private half includes a master bedroom with bathroom, small storage and laundry rooms, an office made of two children’s bedrooms, and an additional bathroom. Despite being more compact than many new single-family houses, it has most of the essential elements.

Angelika Taschen, a PhD in art history, knew the house from Shulman’s photos before she saw the real thing. She worried it might be difficult to live there.

She said that besides limiting her trips out of the house because of the funicular, living there didn’t alter her behavior. “Day-to-day life is really easy,” she says, often easier “than in a conventional home where the architect has not thought so much about every single detail.”

Lautner, despite his reputation as having a strong personality, worked hard to suit his clients and their inner lives.

Angelika describes the place as having a spiritual impact, almost like a church. “With this house he found and expressed this almost religious spirit with a perfect architectural language in general, but also in detail.”

Benedikt likens the house to an eagle’s nest. “You feel safe. It’s warm and human, not a cold place. You would not expect it from outside.”

The only consistent problem with the house, Taschen says, is that its technology often fails in subtle but frustrating ways. “Every day there is something not working,” he says. “The maintenance is 10 times higher than in any other building. Everything is much more complicated. To get cable or Internet, they have to come 10 times.

It’s like having a vintage car — a ’55 Mercedes. More difficult. But they have a personality to them, ya?

In Escher’s first meeting with Taschen, the restoration architect pointed out which pieces were original, which needed to be replaced, and which details deserved restoration. “He interrupted me in about half a minute and said in German, ‘Herr Escher, why don’t you do what you think is right?'”

For Escher, a native of Switzerland who loves the rational, structure-inspired work of Lautner, Neutra and the late Pierre Koenig, this was a gift from the gods. His firm, which he runs with partner Ravi GuneWardena, had been partly inspired by classic California Modernism, and here he could delve into a great Modernist’s original conception. (Escher wrote the first book on Lautner a few years after moving to Los Angeles in 1988, and oversees the John Lautner Archives.)

The architect describes the job as a philosophical challenge.

“I think the hardest thing was developing an intellectual strategy for how to deal with it,” Escher says, calling the task, “a combination of research into history and technology, and to some degree into Lautner’s psychology. You can’t be afraid of a house like that: You have to, in some cases, be kind of forceful.”

The forcefulness was balanced with the architects’ own “sensitive and careful” respect for Lautner’s intentions: The goal was to undo the damage previous tenants had exacted, and to simplify. The restoration team removed layers of paint, paneled the walls with the same shade of ash wood used for the original built-in couches and cabinets (some of which needed repair or restoration), and replaced the fixed-paneled windows with frameless glass.

“We wanted to make it as invisible and elegant as possible,” says Escher. “That’s something that’s important to all our projects: We don’t try to draw attention to a detail. It should disappear.” GuneWardena compares the process to “pruning a garden, to reveal the clarity of the structure.”

They also tried to match what they thought Lautner would have chosen if he’d had access to contemporary workmanship and a larger budget: The original drawings, for instance, described a floor of random broken slate, but the day’s technology would not allow the stone to be cut thinly enough to keep from destabilizing the house. Escher’s restoration ran the flagstone pattern inside and out, across the bridge that connects the front door to the funicular.

One of the biggest challenges was bringing art into the house, difficult when a home already exerts a bold personality.

“The Taschens originally wanted to have more period pieces,” Escher says. “But we didn’t want the house to be a museum of the 1960s.”

Today, Chemosphere is furnished sparely with clean-lined pieces including Eames chairs and a coffee table and an oval Florence Knoll dining room table. Taschen commissioned the suspended lamps of bent plexiglass strips by Cuban-born L.A. artist Jorge Pardo and the pastiche rug designed by German painter Albert Oehlen.

“These Lautner houses are like custom-made clothes,” Escher says, “so you really have to find the right tenant for them. Taschen was perfect for the house — he immediately grasped what the house was about, and he was entirely open to our ideas for the place, like ripping out the glass and commissioning pieces by artists.”

During the first few years the Taschens lived there, the house became locally famous for their parties, where photographer Bill Claxton and his model wife Peggy Moffett would carouse with porn stars, jazz musicians and director Billy Wilder.

These days, now that Taschen has an office in Hollywood and a bookstore in Beverly Hills, the place has reverted to being, mostly, a house for him and fiancee Lauren Wiener. He canceled plans for a guesthouse designed by Rem Koolhaas at Chemosphere’s base because he feared it would visually compete with the main house. His only major plan is to replace the bird-cage-like funicular with a more open one.

Taschen remembers going to a Beverly Hills open house where “a fashionable Hollywood film star” was selling his Neutra home. The young actor, in the publisher’s estimate, “had robbed the soul of the house. If you make tiny changes that don’t fit the integrity of the house, you destroy it. It’s like a movie where you add a scene of someone with a mobile phone in 1958, or a style of shirt or car that wouldn’t have existed until years later.

“It’s the responsibility of the owner to preserve it for future generations,” Taschen says, “because a house like this doesn’t belong to one or two people: It belongs to mankind.”

The Chemosphere restoration won an award from the Los Angeles Conservancy as well as the approval of its original tenant.

“Today there are materials that weren’t available then,” Malin says. “The place is much better than when I was in there — and it’s in keeping with Lautner’s vision.”

Taschen says it’s hard to get bored with the place — despite the rain this winter — since the enormous windows offer an expansive view on the world. “It’s like a wide-screen movie,” he says. “Always changing.”

Its present appearance is tasteful and inspiring, which is why we decided to showcase it on Freshome. The apartment has no less than 700 square feet and is structured as follows: an open plan living room with dining and kitchen area, a transparent bedroom, a large hallway, dressing room and two bathrooms. The layout approach is daring, as the architect decided to go for an open, connected space, welcoming socializing. However, the living, kitchen and bedroom areas are cleverly delimited through the use of colors, textures and glass accordingly. Floor to ceiling windows ensure a large degree of natural light inside the loft.

I especially like the separation of the bedroom with the glass wall and curtains – what better way to divide space when you don’t have much of it?

The general black and white atmosphere is completed by grey shades, without being boring. In a wide- open environment, every little thing is simple and modern at the same time. No matter it is a living room, a bedroom or an office space, everything is very modern, even futuristic. The presence of glass ensures transparency, while the modern furniture pieces are in harmony with the environment.

The whiteness of the environment is in perfect contrast with the black spots, providing an elegant air that is intriguing in its perfection. This futuristic ambient with all sorts of modern devices, with elegant curtains that give personality to the rooms, with modern lamps of different shapes, with modern furniture of the highest quality ensures comfort and self-confidence. Such spaces are for a well-defined category of people, those who can afford what seems to be the definition of luxury. Designed by Geometrix, they are the best proof that dreams come true; the smart examples in the pictures stand for the concept of ideal place.

This was once a buzzing, thriving factory where people came to work day after day to produce fabrics and textiles. The huge space could have been daunting but, instead of feeling negative about it, Cristina plunged into a whirl of ideas and thoughts about how to make this vast area into various living zones without adding partitions or walls.

When she first designed it she was very particular that it should be a continuous space. The bedroom for example, is cleverly concealed behind the chimney and is only cut off from the living area by heavy curtains. Cristina has deliberately kept as many of the original features as possible like the brick walls and columns and where she has had to replace things she has tried to keep everything as authentic as possible. The wooden floor is made up from old railway sleepers and the windows, although brand new, are based on the old wooden ones but with an enamel covering.

Everything is based on industrial design. The sunken bath is made of polished concrete and is reminiscent of a Moorish bathhouse where Cristina and her family can relax as well as bathe. The fact that the whole house has no vivid colours and is very neutral means that you can walk from area to area and continuously feel at one. ‘I wanted to make this one large space that we could live in together, eat, sleep, bathe and work. It is very important that everything blends into one so I couldnâ€t have lots of colour otherwise it just would never have worked as it does. I love the tranquillity – the negative colours work here perfectly and it isnâ€t necessary to break it up.â€

The L-shaped floor plan has two areas – the private one that is the main sitting area, bed and bathroom plus a guest room and then there is the kitchen, dining room and chill out space. Where Cristina has been particularly clever is in her design of the furniture. Often in such large spaces the furniture is totally out of proportion, but everything here is definitely on the large side and the scale of the high settees, huge lampshades and fabulous Indonesian kitchen chairs work really well.

Particularly fun are the swing and vast steel interlocking rings that are not just eye catching but are Cristinaâ€s personal touch. ‘Itâ€s rather like having a signature, I just wanted to make everyone smile when they walked in!†Everything is very geometric – the straight lines of the furniture, the way the kitchen and dining room tables are aligned but Cristina likes it that way ‘It gives expression to everything and a sort of silent elegance.â€

After being in the apartment for a while you do unwind – you feel that the furniture doesnâ€t invade your space – there is room to breathe and certainly on a stiflingly hot day in the middle of summer it must be a lifesaver to retreat back to this cool, calm scene.

Cristina Rodriguez-Lâ€Atelier.
cristinarodriguez.com.es T: +34 93 200 14 56.

Photos ©2004 Ken Sparkes Words: Lynda Clark.
First published in SPACES issue 07 ©2004 Polygon Publishing Ltd

A nation that represents peace. A nation dealing with unimaginable tragedy with dignity and grace. A nation that understands, deep within its culture, the might and power of nature, the vulnerability and mortality of man.

A country, and a culture, that has faced enormous tragedy more than once, that has managed to survive and thrive despite tragedy.

If you don’t know how to help, Googleâ€s homepage has a link to a comprehensive set of resources to help people in Japan. Facebook, along with Causes, has an extensive project to raise funds for Japan; Apple has made it possible for its 200m account holders to donate via iTunes.

What makes people so attracted to barns? To be honest I am not sure if everyone feels this way but every time I see a restored barn transformed into a beautiful home I really feel inspired by the natural beauty and architecture.

Itâ€s no different with this outstanding space. New York-based architect Russell Groves did a tremendous job preserving the existing structure and bringing modernity to it as well. He knew how to use the height of the barn to create even more interest with dramatic Capiz-shell globe chandeliers and with gorgeous furniture, many from his own collection. The result is a rustic, yet glamorous and comfortable, setting for the whole family to enjoy.

Ready to get inspired?

Natural Beauty

This entryway feels warm yet itâ€s very minimal.

Home

Gorgeous architecture and interiors.

Warm Feeling

This place has a mixture of very clean lines and soft furniture. I really like how well it works together.

Modern

Very interesting choice of furnishings but what really gets my attention is the rope around this wood beam.

Comfort

Iâ€ve mentioned before that every house should have a quiet spot. This is a perfect spot to have “me” time.

Kitchen

I love the simplicity of this kitchen and I think itâ€s perfect for a space like this. The countertops along the walls are zinc, while the island is topped with Caesarstone.

Dining

This table blends perfectly with these gorgeous floors.

Rest

I like that the furniture is simple because what really matters here are those beautiful beams.

Rustic Spa

This is a gorgeous bathroom and I love all the natural elements found here, including the slate flooring.

Guest House

This beautiful and elegant guest house echoes the main elements of the main house.

via Home Bunch – An Interior Design & Luxury Homes Blog