Pool and backyard landscaping are the only previous features that remained from the original home, minus a few walls on the interior and newly installed waterless grass for the ground cover. Exterior patio with Porcelain Wood Grain tiles. Designed with a standing seam metal roof, with internal drainage system for hidden gutters design. Rain chain and rain barrels for rain harvesting. Retrofitted with Hardy Frames prefabricated shear walls for up to date earthquake safety. Opening both walls to the backyard, there are now two 14' folding doors allowing the inside and outside to merge. http://www.hardyframe.com/HF/index.html Amy J Smith Photography

Beall + Thomas Photography
Small beach style l-shaped ceramic tile eat-in kitchen photo with recessed-panel cabinets, white cabinets, granite countertops, white backsplash, ceramic backsplash and an island

The photograph is composed as a deliberate enfilade study, framing the dining room through a deep, mahogany-cased cased opening that functions as both proscenium and threshold. This heavy portal — with its substantial reveal, plinth-like jambs and crisply mitered head casing — establishes a strong rectilinear armature that compresses the foreground and, by contrast, releases the eye into the luminous volume beyond. The plan reads as a classic pre-war apartment sequence: an axial sightline runs from the gallery floor, across the field of the dining room, and terminates at the window wall, where a curtained bay borrows daylight from the street. The ceiling is articulated by shallow beam drops or applied soffits — a coffer-adjacent treatment that registers the building's structural grid while lending the room a subtle sense of enclosure and datum. Geometry is orchestrated around opposing figures: the orthogonal rigor of casings, valance, beam lines and picture frames set against the centralized circular table, whose radial symmetry anchors the room's midpoint directly beneath the chandelier. Furnishings are held in a loose, non-touching arrangement, with generous circulation clearance at the perimeter, so that the room's volume — rather than its contents — remains the primary subject. Secondary sightlines to the left, toward a mirrored console and gilt-framed panel, and to the right, toward a picture-lit artwork, quietly widen the perceived footprint and imply adjacent rooms beyond the frame. The material narrative is built on a controlled tonal ascent from dark to light. The foreground is dominated by richly figured, warm-red mahogany millwork and a chevron-laid oak parquet whose bleached, honeyed grain reads with a slight gray wash — a directional pattern that visually propels the viewer toward the interior. Within the dining room, the palette shifts to a low-saturation envelope of chalky off-white plaster walls and putty-toned textiles: floor-length linen or silk-blend drapery panels with a faint slubbed weave, gathered beneath a tailored, flat-front upholstered valance whose crisp horizontal band imparts an atelier precision. Underfoot, a natural sisal or seagrass rug with a linen tape border introduces a coarse, granular tactility that grounds the refined upholstery above; its woven, matte texture is deliberately calibrated against the smoother satin sheen of the dining chairs' subtly striped fabric. The room's tonal fulcrum is the antique carved pedestal table — a near-black, deeply modeled Anglo-Indian or Colonial Revival piece whose pierced apron, scrolled tripod base and paw feet supply the composition's only ornamental exuberance and its darkest value. Accents are chosen for restraint: silvered leaf on the console's fretwork facing, water-gilt on the framed panel, polished nickel or silver on the chandelier and the flower vessel, and the cool white of massed oriental lilies. Undertones remain uniformly warm — greige, ecru, taupe, oatmeal — with cool relief supplied only by the metals and the daylight itself. Lighting is layered with quiet discipline. Natural light enters as a diffused, north-facing wash through a sheer-veiled window, its intensity softened by roller or Roman shading so that the glazing reads as a luminous plane rather than a view; this creates a gentle contre-jour that silhouettes the chandelier and the table's carved base. The multi-arm chandelier — a silvered, pagoda-crested fixture with slender candle sleeves and faceted drops — serves as sculptural punctuation more than as a working source, its warm 2700K glow registering as ambient sparkle. Accent illumination is deployed with curatorial intent: a picture light grazes the framed work at right, while the recessed downlights and the darkened foreground casings produce a chiaroscuro that heightens the sense of arrival. The cumulative atmosphere is one of hushed formality — composed, aerated, and almost monastic in its refusal of visual noise. Stylistically, the room synthesizes into what might be termed Transitional Classicism, or Warm Neutral Modern Traditional: the bones and millwork are unmistakably pre-war Beaux-Arts-derived, yet the flat-front valances, unadorned wall planes, natural-fiber flooring and simplified parson-back chairs reflect a contemporary editorial sensibility. The single antique table operates as a considered anachronism — a note of patinated gravitas within an otherwise pared-back, texturally driven interior — demonstrating a designer's confidence in restraint punctuated by one authoritative gesture.

*Spatial Composition & Architectural Volume** This terrace operates as an outdoor room in the fullest architectural sense: a discrete volume carved from the open air of the upper Manhattan skyline, its perimeter defined not by masonry but by a disciplined green architecture of clipped boxwood parterre hedging and multi-stemmed dogwood standards. The plan is organized on a clear axial logic — the rectilinear dining table sits centered on the sightline that threads between the flanking specimen trees and terminates in the middle distance on the Central Park tree canopy and the Columbus Circle towers beyond. That deliberate framing device is the composition's essential move: the trees function as proscenium, the hedge line as a low balustrade wall, and the powder-coated metal railing as a nearly dematerialized threshold, so the borrowed landscape is enlisted as the room's fourth elevation. Vertical enclosure is calibrated in three tiers — ground-plane ivy at ankle height, hedge and planter coping at seated eye level, and the airy tracery of tree canopy overhead — producing a ceiling plane implied rather than built, dappled and permeable. To the left, the load-bearing buff brick of the building's flank grounds the scheme with genuine architectural mass and reads as a masonry pilaster anchoring an otherwise open-sided plan, while at right a low stone-topped service console with recessed pull hardware and a monumental orb planter provides an asymmetrical counterweight, terminating circulation and articulating a secondary zone without interrupting flow. Large-format square paving, laid in a regular grid, provides the module against which all furniture placement is measured. **Materiality, Color & Texture** The material palette is restrained to a narrow tonal band of warm neutrals, allowing chlorophyll green to carry the scheme's entire chromatic charge. Underfoot, honed grey-taupe stone pavers offer a matte, slightly granular surface with a cool undertone; adjacent, the brick wall introduces a sandy, oatmeal-toned masonry with visible mortar coursing whose horizontality and faint striation supply the composition's only decorative pattern. Furniture is executed in a matte white or bone powder-coated aluminum frame with woven cord or resin-strap seat backs — an open basketweave that reads as textile rather than metal and softens the geometry with a hand-crafted grain. Cushions in pale greige linen-weave add a further degree of tactile compliance. Planters are dark bronze-toned metal, deliberately recessive so that mass reads as foliage rather than container, while the pale cast-stone orb planter introduces a sculptural, slightly chalky, faceted surface that catches light like unglazed ceramic. The horticultural texture work is the true material sophistication here: the tight, fine-leaved matte density of boxwood set against the broad, glossy, lacquer-like foliage of the ivy, and both played against the dogwoods' larger leaves already turning bronze, oxblood, and citron at the edges. The single note of saturation — a low, tightly massed arrangement of coral, apricot, and chartreuse blooms in a white cachepot — functions as a deliberate chromatic accent, keyed precisely to the autumnal leaf-turn overhead. **Lighting, Atmosphere & Style Profile** Natural light is the primary design instrument. The photograph captures a high, diffuse, slightly overexposed sky that renders the skyline in soft atmospheric perspective while raking light filters through the canopy to scatter mobile dappling across the paving — a chiaroscuro that animates an otherwise static geometry and shifts the room's character hourly. Artificial lighting is intentionally understated and architectural in intent: a suspended conical pendant in dark matte metal, hung at the right beneath the canopy, signals evening use and provides a small, precise silhouette against the ivy screen, while low-level integrated fixtures within planters and hedging would supply the subdued wash appropriate to a terrace that must never compete with the ambient glow of the city. The resulting atmosphere is one of considered seclusion — a green-walled cloister suspended above the metropolis, contemplative rather than performative. Stylistically, the project reads as Soft Minimalism in dialogue with a distinctly European, formal-garden discipline: the axial planning, clipped topiary, and standard-trained trees derive from classical parterre tradition, but they are executed with contemporary restraint — no ornament, no historicist detail, a single furniture gesture, a monochrome envelope. The synthesis might be termed Tailored Naturalism: an aesthetic in which rigorous geometry and a near-silent material palette exist precisely to give primacy to living texture, seasonal change, and the framed view.

**Spatial Composition & Architectural Volume** This is a room conceived as a stage for a single object, and the architecture obligingly recedes into the role of proscenium. The plan reads as a generous, laterally-oriented salon — likely a piano room carved from the corner of a metropolitan penthouse — organized around an L-shaped glazing sequence that turns the corner and dissolves two of the four enclosing planes. A dropped soffit tray, articulated as a crisply mitred perimeter reveal with an integrated cove, floats above the seating and instrument zone, its shadow-gap detailing lowering the apparent datum and conferring intimacy on an otherwise expansive volume. The plaster ceiling reads as a single continuous membrane, its recessed channels doubling as concealed curtain tracks and linear light slots, thereby suppressing any surface-mounted apparatus. On the left, a full-height run of hand-carved, ripple-textured oak millwork operates as both threshold and tectonic bookend — a vertical mass that anchors the composition against the weightlessness of the fenestration opposite. The pier between the two window bays is clad in pale ribbed limestone or fluted plaster, functioning as a quiet pilaster that structures the sightlines rather than interrupting them. Circulation is centrifugal: the herringbone-laid oak parquet establishes a diagonal grain that pulls the eye toward the terrace, while the rug's rectilinear footprint carves out a defined *piano nobile* island within the open field. The grand piano, positioned obliquely with its raised lid oriented back into the room, becomes the volume's sculptural fulcrum — its cabriole-derived silhouette and blade-thin tapered legs (a distinctly contemporary reinterpretation, likely a designer-authored instrument) providing curvilinear counterpoint to the room's orthogonal discipline. **Materiality, Color & Texture** The palette is a study in monochromatic warmth punctuated by a single decisive act of contrast. Nearly every surface resides within a narrow chromatic band of oatmeal, bone, greige and pale honey — undertones consistently warm-neutral, veering toward the sandy rather than the grey, which prevents the minimalism from reading as clinical. The floor's white-oak herringbone is finished with a matte, lightly limed patina that keeps the grain legible without gloss; the field rug in silk-and-viscose introduces a lustrous, cloud-like abraded pattern, its mineral-grey striations reading almost as sumi-e wash or weathered concrete, and providing the room's only tonal modulation at floor level. The drapery — a densely woven linen or linen-blend in a slubbed sand tone, hung with tightly gathered, full-height pinch pleats — carries a subtle vertical stripe or ribbed jacquard that catches raking light and animates the perimeter. Against this, the carved oak volume at left is the tactile protagonist: a low-relief, chiselled facetting that reads as adze-worked or gouged, generating a shifting moiré of micro-shadow and elevating a utilitarian storage wall into applied art. The piano's satin-black lacquer is the compositional anchor — deep, absorbent, and deliberately non-reflective on its exterior case while its interior lid reveals a mottled, patinated bronze-brown, a warm secret held within the black. Brass appears with real restraint: the lid hinges, the harp and action, the sabot-like disc on the bench flank. Nature supplies the only saturated chroma — the emerald ivy hedge framed in the left window and the topiary beyond the right — treated as living tapestry, effectively a curated *borrowed landscape*. **Lighting, Atmosphere & Style Profile** The lighting strategy is almost entirely subtractive: daylight is admitted in broad, low-glare sheets through minimal-sightline steel or slim-profile aluminium glazing, then softened and diffused by the sheer-adjacent linen and the pale, light-returning plaster envelope. The result is a high-key, shadowless luminosity with a distinctly diffuse northern quality, in which form is described by gradient rather than by hard contrast — note how the piano's black mass reads as silhouette against the terrace glare, while its curved bentwood rim catches a single soft specular highlight. Artificial illumination is entirely concealed within the ceiling reveals and coves, ensuring that after dark the room will be washed rather than punctured; the deliberate absence of decorative pendants or table lamps in this frame reinforces the reading of the instrument as the sole permitted ornament. Atmospherically the room is contemplative, acoustically soft, and tuned to a single activity — a *musica da camera* interior in the truest sense. Stylistically it synthesizes into what might best be termed **Soft Minimalism with a couture-craft inflection**: the rigour and reductive detailing of late-modernist practice, warmed by the tactile, hand-worked surfaces and neutral tonalities of Japandi and Belgian-inflected quiet luxury. The governing thesis is one of *sublimated luxury* — value expressed through millwork tolerance, drapery yardage, plaster craft and the confident emptiness of the plan, rather than through pattern, colour or accumulation.

Inspiration for a transitional home design remodel in Minneapolis

Living space with curved clear cedar ceilings, built-in media and storage walls, custom artwork and custom furniture - Interior Architecture: HAUS | Architecture + LEVEL Interiors - Photography: Ryan Kurtz

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Photo of a front yard garden path in Los Angeles.

Photo by Julie Mikos.
Home office - eclectic home office idea in San Francisco

Andrew Pogue Photography
Large trendy black three-story stucco flat roof photo in Seattle

Originally, the exterior of the Napa ranch residence was a standard knocked down stucco finish. We covered over the entire exterior of the house with a natural plaster product that has been made in Italy for centuries, known as Rialto or Vero. This product is a combination of slaked lime mixed with 60% reconstituted crushed marble dust. Quarried from the legendary Carrara marble mines. The finish itself is a vertically combed striated texture embedded into the plaster. While it cures, a transparent group of patinas are applied to the stone-like plaster substance to create a look of an aged villa.

Venetian plaster, sample board in preparation for a project.

Brickmoon Design Residential Architecture, Gabriel Home Builders, Interior Design by Kennedi Design Group
Example of a large mountain style beige two-story stucco exterior home design in Houston

Corbin Henry
Example of a tuscan family room design in Sacramento

Riad Tile
Bathroom - contemporary cement tile floor and pink floor bathroom idea in Santa Barbara

This section of the front yard was excavated and filled in with drainage rocks to create a Rain Garden. This is situated in a spot that captures storm-water flow coming down the hillside and provides a basin to store rainwater that normally would have run straight off the slope. Blue River Rocks cover the area and create an illusion of water when wet.

Detail of LED wall sconce with white glass tile background
Inspiration for a small contemporary kids' white tile and glass tile porcelain tile and gray floor alcove bathtub remodel in New York with flat-panel cabinets, dark wood cabinets, a two-piece toilet, green walls and an integrated sink

Example of a mid-sized transitional dark wood floor and brown floor double front door design in Austin with gray walls and a black front door