ANDREW MYERS

Clive and Julie Bridgwater reach an inspiring summit for a Southern California family…

The GIFT A one-of-a-kind circa-1900 gold-and-quartz Fabergé snakehead cane handle. $950,000 From 1885, when Tsar Alexander III appointed Peter Carl Fabergé the jeweler and goldsmith to the Russian Imperial Court, until 1918, when the Bolsheviks confiscated his company’s inventory, the House of Fabergé created as many as 250,000 pieces in gold, silver, malachite, jade, lapis […]

Among the treasures currently available at M.S. Rau Antiques, a fine- and decorative-arts emporium on Royal Street in New Orleans’ French Quarter, are an exquisite pair of early-19th-century English celestial and terrestrial globes by cartographers John Newton and Son, as well as what gallery owner Bill Rau calls “a phenomenal and incredibly rare silver coffee […]

Throughout his career as an architect, designer, and artist, Ron Arad has done much to destroy the distinctions between the industrial, decorative, and fine arts, as well as those between art and architecture. “Do I necessarily see a distinction? No,” says this native of Israel who now lives in London. “Let us not be neurotic […]

Can Los Angeles—a youth-obsessed metropolis where erasing the signs of aging is a full-time job for many—love what is old? Judging from the past success of the Los Angeles Antiques Show, an annual Wednesday-through-Sunday event held at Santa Monica Airport’s Barker Hangar, the answer is an unequivocal yes. “Los Angeles is a city of creative […]

“When evaluating a piece for prospective purchase, the first question I always ask myself is, ‘Was it modern in its time, or was it prudent, or conservative?’ ” says Roberto Polo, the artistic director of Paris’ Galerie Historismus, which focuses on European decorative art created by architects and designers primarily from 1840 to 1910. While […]

A collaboration between Poggenpohl and Porsche Design Group has produced a kitchen that is as sleek and as sophisticated as a sports car. Last fall, the two companies—the 116-year-old German kitchen manufacturer and the 36-year-old German maker of high-end men’s products (a subsidiary of the carmaker Porsche)—revealed their finished kitchen to VIPs at Porsche’s automaking factory […]

The architecture of Southern California’s Balboa Island evokes that of Nantucket and other East Coast islands. Like the Atlantic’s weathered, shingled cottages, the 1920s wooden bungalows of this small vacation community just off the Newport Beach mainland display an abundance of character and convey a sense of warmth. Against this backdrop, on a prominent point […]

Andrew Zega and Bernd H. Dams’ architectural watercolors are on display at New York’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, at the Musée de I’lle-de-France at Sceaux, and in five books that they have coauthored. (Their latest, the $1,400 Versailles: The Château and Its Satellites [Paris: Connaissance et Memoires, 2007], presents the pairs’ paintings of historic French […]

At the new Grupo Kettal shop in Coral Gables, Fla., the backdrops are minimalist, and on most days the space is filled with sunlight that pours through the two-story-tall glass wall fronting the building. The store, the first in North America for the Spanish outdoor furniture company (it has nine in Europe), is an ideal […]