WATCHING Chanel-clad Americans graze on foie gras as they pored over gilded 18th-century consoles and Ruhlmann cabinets at a preview of the 22nd Biennale des Antiquaires — Europe’s grandest antiques show — you would never guess that there was a strain in French-American relations.

NEWPORT, R.I. – RONALD LEE FLEMING said he felt exultant when he purchased Bellevue House in 1999. The house, a Colonial Revival mansion built in 1910, was the work of the celebrated architect Ogden Codman Jr., and a repository of some particularly colorful social history. Codman had designed it for his cousin Martha Codman, a…

Disney Hall, designed by Frank Gehry, is not just an architectural tour de force. With a budget that ballooned from the original estimate of $110 million to $274 million, it became a rare naming opportunity, a kind of permanent billboard for wealthy people to have their names inscribed.

George Trescher’s familiarity with the extramarital relations of New York Society was just one weapon in his sophisticated arsenal as a fund-raiser par excellence.

AS Venice shimmered beneath a pale full moon last week, it was gridlock time on the Grand Canal, with water taxis laden with American plutocrats and their couture-clad inamoratas racing from palazzo to palazzo to attend dinners and receptions to mark the opening of the 49th Venice Biennale. Also making a splash was a gaggle…

I rather like the idea of a whole new phase of life, with fewer possessions,” Christopher Gibbs said, somewhat unconvincingly. Mr. Gibbs, 62, was gazing wistfully at the handsome stone exterior of the Manor House at Clifton Hampden, a rambling three-story house in Oxfordshire, built for his family in the 1840’s, which he reluctantly sold…

CLIENTS willing to indulge the futuristic whims of architects are notoriously rare. But Winka Dubbeldam, a Dutch-born architect based in Manhattan, seems to have a knack for attracting patrons susceptible to her visual poetry and her sculptor’s passion for combining natural materials to achieve novel effects. Among her fans, the famously demanding architect Peter Eisenman…

We grow accustomed to the Dark –/When Light is put away,”wrote Emily Dickinson, one of John Dugdale’s favorite poets. Mr. Dugdale sat, seemingly entranced by the glow from a fire lapping in the grate one afternoon last week. Auburn leaves were scampering past a window of the austerely beautiful blue parlor at Lockwood Farm, his…

Isabella Blow and her husband Detmar live in a former artisan’s cottage with a conventional Georgian facade with startling light shows at night that jolt the neighborhood.

”I heard a bloodcurdling scream as hot water gushed up and scalded her behind,” said John Pringle, recalling the poignant discomfort of the wife of the Governor of Jamaica when a newly installed toilet erupted on the opening night of Round Hill, the legendary Jamaican resort he founded in 1951.

A walk through of Gianni Versace’s recently completed 11,000 square foot Manhattan townhouse led by the designer himself.

I’m always complaining about my ponds,” said Carolyne Roehm, the former fashion designer, glancing toward the extravagant series of interconnecting ponds and waterfalls on what was once a dry meadow at Weatherstone Farm, her sprawling estate in Sharon, Conn.