SHEILA PEPE, A BESPECTACLED ARTIST with a knowing smile, stands in a hallway of the new Chambers Hotel finishing an installation titled Different Things with Fixed and Ambiguous Pictures. Pepe is attaching tiny sculptures made of plaster and aluminum to a wall facing the elevator, then tracing a line around their shadows to highlight recognizable shapes, “like when you play cloud games as a kid,” she explains. At the Chambers, which opened in late February on West 56th Street in Manhattan, promising new artists and some better-known veterans, like the filmmaker John Waters, were hired to design site-specific installations for the landings of the third through the fourteenth floors. Museum Editions, an arts consultancy, selected scores of other artworks for the 77 rooms and the lobby.

The art–impossible to miss–is hung in seemingly haphazard configurations to reflect a private collector’s eclectic taste. “In most other cases, the architecture dictates the art,” says Kimberly Silvia of The Rockwell Group, which designed the Chambers. “Here we want you to look at the art.” The hotel even plans to broadcast a video by Whitney Biennial artist Jeremy Blake on its in-house TV channel.

Hotels evolve with the times. The palatial suites and ballrooms of the 19th century indulged a bejeweled leisure class. Then came Hiltons and Sheratons as conformist as IBM’s dress code, and no wonder: they catered to mass markets and tired businessmen. The boutique hotel marked an era when capitalism turned cool and the workday naturally spilled into the lobby bar. Now comes the next evolutionary step in hospitality: the art hotel.

Art hotels like the Chambers shouldn’t be confused with hotels that have a lot of art. What distinguishes them is the role art plays in their identities and marketing. Art endows the art hotel with a priceless aura of high culture. As New York, London, and Berlin overflow with designer lodgings, the art hotel attracts sophisticated clients who have grown jaded with boutiques and entices them to linger and return.

As a rule, art hotels feature internationally recognized painters and sculptors, or young artists gaining legitimacy in art-world circles. This sets them apart from “hip hotels,” but also from quirkier establishments (say, New York’s Chelsea Hotel) that display canvases by friends and debtors of the owner, or idiosyncratic art spaces that function as hotels, such as Berlin’s Propeller Island City Lodge (home of “the world’s smallest hotel room, full of dwarves”).

Several cultural trends converge in art hotels. Boutique hotels broke new ground in sophistication in the 1980s–the same decade when visual artists gained genuine star appeal. Tastes are changing. In the ‘905, executives switched from Brooks Brothers to Comme des Garcons. The road warriors of the fashion and media industries–many of them women–tuned in to art in a way the old boys hadn’t. Gone, too, are the days when Mark Rothko resented having his paintings hang in the Four Seasons restaurant. These days, artists embrace design openly, and they are more willing to take on commercial projects. Think of Damien Hirst’s Gesamtkunstwerk restaurant, Pharmacy, in London, or Andreas Gursky’s monumental photographs to be installed in Rem Koolhaas’s Prada emporia. “Since the time of Warhol, artists have stopped feeling like monks who have to pray before the sacred flames,” says philosopherand art critic Arthur C. Danto. “They are willing to consider most propositions. Aleksandr Rodchenko’s idea–’art into life’–h as been enthusiastically endorsed.”

In its purest manifestation, the art hotel is the brainchild of Dirk Gadeke, an ebullient Berlin developer and art collector. He came up with the idea more than a decade ago in Paris, while dining with his friend, the irreverent and prolific German artist Wolf Vostell. “I had so much of his work, but he wanted to sell me more,” Gadeke remembers. “So I said, ‘Let’s do this as a hotel.’ Then I made this idea into a marketing concept, and it went all over the world.”

Gadeke’s approach is “one hotel, one artist,” and he uses only brand-name painters and sculptors whose work he and his wife collect. The first “art’otel,” an unpretentious three-star business accommodation full of Vostell works, opened in 1990 near West Berlin’s Kurfurstendamm, the city’s main commercial street. “Most people thought I made a design hotel, like the Royalton,” Gadeke says. “But I made an art hotel–first art, then hotel.” Managed by the Sorat chain, and expanded in 1996 to 33 rooms, the hotel offers public areas, hallways, and guestrooms chockablock with pictures, sculptures, and mixed-media works, including a 12-foot sculpture on the roof. Lamps project room numbers on the floors. The carpets, designed by David Hockney, display representations of doormats and runners woven directly into the fabric.

Next came art’otel Potsdam, matching Dusseldorf artist Katharina Sieverding with English designer Jasper Morrison. It was the first art’otel to connect a new building, by Ralf and Jan Rave, to a historical edifice, an 1848 Italian castello. The German neo-expressionist A.R. Penck was selected for the third project, in Dresden, along with the Italian interior designer Denis Santachiara. The 174-room hotel is also crowned by a sculpture, and it includes an art gallery (the Kunsthalle Dresden) that doubles as a conference room.

Gadek fully realized his concept of integrating art and architecture with the 109-room art’otel Baselitz, which opened two years ago in the Mitte section of East Berlin. The blending of contemporary design with the rococo Ermelerhaus, formerly the palatial residence of a beer merchant that houses a well-known restaurant of the same name, is the work of Johanne Nalbach, one of Europe’s few successful female architects, Nalbach designed hovering cantilevered furniture for the guestrooms. Carpets, which change hues from floor to floor, appearing in red, green, blue, or aubergine, are inscribed with a quote from Aristotle about the meaning of art (in the hand of Nalbach’s husband and business partner, Gernot). The result balances Georg Baselitz’s somewhat melancholy monochromatic watercolors and lithographs with colorful, functional interiors. Nalbach did not collaborate directly with Baselitz: “You can’t create a room for the artist,” she says. “Architecture is an art and painting is an art. The space should be neutral, like a museum.”

Gadeke is a restless sort of man, and he has aggressively pursued his dream of exporting the art’otel brand. Teaming up with Jonathan Read, chairman of the Tucson-based Park Plaza group and a fellow art collector, he has franchised art’otels around the world. A four-star art’otel opened last year in Budapest, owned by another German art collector, Joseph Domberger. The new building, by Magyar Epitok, overlooks the Danube and incorporates four beautifully restored baroque fishermen’s houses. What makes the Budapest project stand out from the other art’otels is the level of involvement by Donald Sultan, a minimalist American artist known largely for prints. In addition to supplying 600 works featuring his signature lemons, flowers, and butterflies, Sultan designed the domino and playing card motifs on the hotel’s carpets and tableware. His tiny bird sculptures greet guests in all 165 rooms. He even designed the restaurant menus.

With the formula established, art’otels are now planned for London, Paris, Rome, Miami, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Satellites will eventually open in NewYork, Tokyo, Sydney, Singapore, San Francisco, Dublin, Bilbao, and Barcelona. Gadeke will open the art’otel Warhol in Berlin later this year, and he is exploring a Warsaw project with Daniel Liebeskind. Rebecca Horn, Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, and James Rosenquist are among the artists being considered for future projects. Meanwhile, kindred art hotels are sprouting from London to Zurich. London’s Westbourne, for instance, has commissioned four British artists to design a guestroom each and is hanging rotating exhibitions of “Brit Art” in the lodging’s remaining 16 rooms and the lobby.

Gadeke’s idea is far from cheap. Single-artist projects require hundreds of artworks, including major canvases and sculptures — a volume few artists can match. Even at wholesale prices, museum-quality art is expensive, but younger artists, though more affordable, have limited branding potential. There are security concerns (to date no thefts have been reported from any art hotel, but hefty insurance policies must be taken out to protect artworks from sticky fingers). Legal contests may arise when the permanent installations are demolished or repurposed.

At the Chambers, artists sign a contract to maintain their installations. Even so, wear and tear is inevitable. Most important, according to Chambers developer Ira Drukier, the art hotel concept added about 20 to 25 percent to the $34-million development costs and almost 50 percent to the construction timeline. Gadeke estimates that art’otels cost about $175,000 per room to design and construct, a 30 percent markup from the usual $135,000. These expenses predispose art hotels to a five-star clientele. But Gadeke is wary of luxury. “My target group is people who have art in their head. I have to keep my hotels to three or four stars, because intelligent people don’t have money.”

Matching the art with the right design is the greatest challenge. There are three options: the interior design can take thematic cues from the lifestyles of artists and art collectors; it can counterbalance the emphasis on art with its own powerful visual language; or it can remain totally neutral. The strategy is a matter of tension and balance. In Dresden, Denis Santachiara’s liquid-crystal “magic windows” (which expose the bathrooms and turn milky white with the flick of a switch), his strange “welcoming lamps” (they blow air on yellow silk after a guest enters), and his eccentric yellow “reception egg” are willfully at odds with A.R. Penck’s rough-hewn, somber works. Such ornaments and contrasts are anathema to Berlin’s Johanne Nalbach, proponent of the museum approach, who believes that the design should not be “allowed to fight with the art.” At the Chambers, David Rockwell, restricted by a mere 5o-foot-wide lot, rejected the idea of designing a miniature version of a grand luxury hotel in favor of cre ating “a bigger version of a residence.” His concept was an artist’s loft, with walnut floors, plaster walls, concrete ceilings, exposed pipes, and glass drafting tables that sit on wood sawhorses. “The art program came out of wanting to encourage a unique attitude for the hotel that would vary floor to floor,” Rockwell says, adding that the artists had “a lot of leeway about whether their piece would be on the wall, or whether it would be the wall.”

For Rockwell, the use of art is not so much about branding a project as about the collaborative exploration of new frontiers in architecture. “It is more interesting to think about art as a means to be provocative and make people look at things in a fresh new way,” he says. “Chambers takes art out of a world that has to have it with a capital A and puts it in deliberately atypical locations.”

Other architects and developers appear to share his view. Ground zero for experiments that marry hospitality and art is Las Vegas, home of the theme hotel. Steven Wynn’s hugely successful gallery at the Bellagio, opened in 1998, was just the beginning. By next year, the Guggenheim–by far the greatest risk-taker among American art museums–will open two galleries at the Venetian Resort and Hotel, in alliance with the State Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg. Rem Koolhaas has envisioned Cor-Ten steel walls for the smaller of the two spaces. Masterpieces by the likes of Monet and Kandinsky will “hang” on the steel walls with the help of magnets.

How far other museums might go in the direction of alliances with hotels is open to question. If the Guggenheim succeeds (and reaps the expected revenues), the temptation may prove irresistible. The idea of branding through art and design can also broaden to new contexts. Drukier, who is currently building a pair of condominiums designed by Richard Meier, believes “you can have any part of real estate branded.” There has been talk of designer Giorgio Armani building a hotel. And if there can be branded condominiums, the time may be ripe for branded office towers–”art offices.”

In fact, they may already be here. As Dirk Gadeke’s chauffeured limousine cruises through Berlin, the developer reaches into his vest pocket and pulls out a prepaid phone card. Emblazoned beneath the microchip are the logos of his three brands: “art’otel ,” “art’appart,” and “art’bureau.”

“If I could have done this 50 years ago with Picasso, that would have been good,” Gadeke muses. “But now I have all the best.”

Andras Szanto, deputy director of the Notional Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, writes frequently on visual art, architecture, and contemporary culture.

“I’ll Pick Door Number…”

It’s not cheap to sleep among museum-quality canvases, but budget travelers to Berlin can opt for the Kunstlerheim Luise. Situated in the shadow of the Reichstag, abutting the rail tracks (earplugs provided), this modest hostel is the scrappy artists’ cooperative of the art-hotel scene. Its owners, Rene Studter and Mike Buller, put in long shifts at the front desk and have not applied for a star rating. They renovated the derelict 1825 apartment house in 1998-99 with architect Rainer Seiferth, inviting artists to transform all 32 rooms into full-blown art environments on a budget of about $500 each. Artists get a percentage of the profits when a guest chooses their room, but installations change every three years. Among the more imaginative rooms is  in which a giant oak bed memorializes the wonderful dreams its creator, Dieter Mammel, had in his grandmother’s bed as a child. Also worth checking out:  with furniture made of aircraft parts;  the dog room, with an op-art mural of dog bowls; and  a suite with an oil painting titled Germany under Construction that is reserved, according to the concierge, “for people who want to commit suicide.”

WITH A SINGLE BUILDING, Parisian architect Jean Nouvel changed the face of Lucerne. First opened in 1998, the Kultur und Kongresscentrum Luzern–a combination music hail, convention center, and museum known by the sinister-sounding German acronym KKL–was unlike anything in the postcard-perfect Swiss hamlet. Its imposing angular forms, saturated in a moody wash of wine red and bottle green, and prominently displayed on the shore of Lake Lucerne, introduced the town of medieval bridges and glockenspiels to Nouvel’s brand of modernism: streamlined but packing a few unexpected punches. The problem for many visitors who came to town to marvel at Nouvel’s opus, including fans of the annual international music festival, was that Lucerne’s lodging–largely staid beaux-arts and chalet-style hotels–seemed hopelessly old-fashioned by comparison; bedtime was a design fanatic’s worst nightmare, so to speak.

Fortunately, Urs Karli had come to the same conclusion. So the local hotelier, club king, and restaurateur who introduced Lucerne to Asian fusion and Tex-Mex hired Nouvel to design the town’s first boutique hotel, just a short stroll from the KKL. Karli christened the $4.9 million property The Hotel, a moniker promising a minimalist inn. But to apply this label to Nouvel’s work would be missing the mark. While its composition is certainly spare and its furnishings almost spartan, the hotel has elements that are nothing short of baroque, though rendered in color and light instead of plaster and gilt.

Before opening as The Hotel last April, the 1907 stone structure had various other incarnations: as a kindergarten, office building, women’s school, apartment house, and, fittingly, Lucerne’s first catering and hotel management school. Karli reconfigured its seven stories into 25 guestrooms–a mix of junior suites, garden suites with private patios facing an inner courtyard, and basic studios–plus a cocktail area aptly named The Lounge, and Bam Bou, an Asian fusion restaurant.

Seen from outside, The Hotel might be mistaken for a seven-story art installation by the likes of Dan Flavin or James Turrell. The windows, uncluttered by drapes, reveal colored light glowing from the interiors and one completely unexpected twist: glimpses of still images from films, printed on seamless canvas and mounted on lobby walls and bedroom ceilings. The scenes are Nouvel’s take on baroque frescoes, but instead of mythological or biblical tales, the imagery–mostly love scenes or erotic tableaux from 25 of the architect’s favorite films–conveys what he calls “a cinematographic anthology of desire.” Among the images are amorous moments from Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons; Ranier Werner Fassbinder’s homoerotic Querelle; Bernardo Bertolucci’s sumptuous Sheltering Sky; and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Al di Ia delle Nuvole. Given the surreal nature of Nouvel’s cinematic homage, it’s fitting that he also included visuals from such surrealist cinematic masters as Luis Bunuel, Wim Wenders, and, of course, Frederico Fellini.

These celluloid-inspired frescoes can’t but dominate the spaces; they also set the color palette that Nouvel and Parisian color specialist Alain Bony, who worked with Nouvel on the KKL, chose for the interiors. For instance, they picked pinks and mauves to echo the colors of the Fellini stills and blue-violet hues in the room displaying the Antonioni images. To increase the guestrooms’ chromatic effect, Nouvel kept the elevators gray and dimly lit and left the corridors sterile.

Nouvel also designed all of the hotel’s furnishings, down to the desks, night tables, and armchairs. He picked a mix of low-tech and sleek materials that wouldn’t detract from the drama of the cinematic ceilings and installed wide-plank wooden floors and painted plaster walls, stainless steel armoires, platform beds, and light fixtures. Clean lines and strong forms take precedence over materials; the desks are simple slabs of wood, while the armoires are tall boxes whose metal surfaces reflect the colors around them. The bathrooms boast square tubs; some also have large windows that overlook the hotel’s inner courtyard, thickly planted with bamboo.

The furnishings throughout the rest of the hotel are equally spare: blocky club chairs and solid wood coffee tables in the lobby, a streamlined stainless steel check-in desk. The lobby’s only decorative flourish is another lush film still: from Fellini’s II Casanova. The sleek bar adjoins the lobby, while the restaurant is tucked into the basement level. This room receives daylight, however, thanks to both large internal windows that link restaurant to lobby and double-height windows facing the street. Canted mirrors mounted near the streetside windows create the slightly confusing optical effects that Nouvel played with in recent projects, such as the swirling, mirrored atrium of Galeries Lafayette’s Berlin outpost.

Nouvel has always preferred expressing immateriality and sleight of hand to weight and solidity, as in the photosensitive, Islamic-inspired sunscreens of his famous Institut du Monde Arabe building or the gossamer glass walls of the Fondation Cartier tower, both in Paris. “Architecture that shows off everything at once is pornographic architecture,” Nouvel says of his approach. “I have always defended the inverse thesis, that of eroticism.”

In The Hotel, he pushes such concepts to new limits: saturating spaces with light and color to create a world much like a darkened theater or even like the realms preserved on celluloid. While his fellow hotel-designing Frenchman Philippe Starck relies on objects like oversized flowerpots and mismatched chairs to make surrealistic playgrounds, Nouvel does so through intangible means. In the process, he redefines minimalism–and offers a new take on the dreamlike worlds of the film greats he honors.

Given bloated property values, it’s unlikely that today’s tiny hotel rooms will grow bigger or that designers will be less inspired to squeeze function and interest out of every square inch.

Recently, over dinner with an urban photographer and a political reporter, I found the conversation turning to sprawl. It’s a topic that also appeals to lawyers and osteopaths and almost anyone owning property in the suburbs. Whole conferences, in fact, are devoted to the tendency of cities to elbow their way into fields and orchards, where they drop obese malls and tacky mansions. Not much comes out of these gripe sessions, though; it seems that Americans may whine, but in the end they just want to spread themselves over undeveloped territory, like children scuffing up a blanket of virgin snow.

Except in today’s hotel rooms. Check into, say, Manhattan’s Lexington Avenue W, and you’re likely to find yourself shuffling sideways around the bed. Show up with a partner at the city’s new Hudson, and you’ll be confined to the bed while your companion hogs all the available floor space. Rooms at the Shoreham are where you can finally learn to do the Hustle as you struggle to make your way to the bathroom. And unless you cut a deal, you will certainly pay more than $200 per night, and probably closer to $300 or $400, for these and other short-stay shoeboxes.

Why haven’t people rebelled against the horribly shrinking guestroom? Chalk it up to boutique hotels, which have improved the designs of their public spaces while reducing the square footage of their private ones. The Library, which recently opened in midtown Manhattan and has floors labeled according to the Dewey Decimal System, contains mostly tiny rooms with themed book collections. But guests aren’t confined to these chambers; they can also read in a parlor-like lounge with a fireplace or in a garden room with a view. Capturing the spirit of conservatories, manor houses, billiard rooms, and opium dens, hotel public spaces offer buffer zones between the isolated guestroom and strange, intimidating street; they are sites where people can be alone together and feel as if they’re altogether somewhere else. In the W’s nature-themed lobby or the Hudson’s baronial eatery, guests can gape at gorgeous baby hipsters who pour in off the streets. No wonder we haven’t heard many complaints about room sizes and prices . People seem to feel they’re getting their money’s worth from the spectacle of the public spaces alone.

In the case of the W (designed by Rockwell Group) and Hudson (designed by Philippe Starck), guests may also appreciate the ingenuity that courses through both projects, not least in the tiny rooms. The W’s provide views of Manhattan through a hole in the bed’s headboard, which faces the door; a visitor’s first glimpse from the corridor is of the wide world beyond the nutshell. Meanwhile, the Hudson’s boast wood-paneled walls that whisper “yacht cabin,” or, in the imagination of some guests, Cuban cigar box. Either way, the design language is luxurious, though the dimensions are miserly.

Given that property values remain bloated in cities like New York, it’s unlikely that hotel rooms will grow bigger or that designers will be less inspired to squeeze function and interest out of every square inch. So as a centerpiece of this March issue, devoted to hospitality design, we invited five firms to design a mythical hotel room of l40 square feet, including bath. We placed the hotel in San Francisco, perhaps the only city more expensive than our own, and gave it a slightly lurid history to encourage provocative concepts. Hoping that participants would apply unorthodox viewpoints, we invited mostly firms with no experience in hotel design. The results not only respond to the way we live away from home, but encapsulate (literally) our essential needs for work, recreation, and comfort anywhere we hang our hats.

Even in these guestrooms, sprawl is still an option: just look at the beds. There’s plenty of room for kicking off shoes and flinging down a tired body, which is all many of us really want to do at the end of the day. Call it suite surrender.

The Ravens won the Superbowl, construction sites dot the harbor, and a wide range of retro-fit projects are bringing new vitality and confidence to “Charm City.” Welcome to Baltimore, where Martin O’Malley, the recently elected 37-year-old mayor, is helping reinvigorate the 272-year-old town. Fortunately, the new buildings have been complemented by transformations of classic old factories into office, retail, and residential spaces. Aesthetically, though, three distinct Baltimores remain: campy and tattered (the one portrayed in John Waters movies); grand and historical (the one enshrined in private clubs and majestic townhouses); and industrial (the one revealed in the city’s massive ship and rail yards).

THREE MUST-SEES

B&O Railroad Museum

Completed in 1884, this impressive building once housed the Baltimore and Ohio Railroads’ passenger train repair shop. Today it is home to a museum to the history of railroads and locomotives. One of the largest circular industrial buildings in the world (actually a 22-sided polygon), it was essentially a garage where engines could pull in, rotate on a 60-foot central platform, and park on a series of radial tracks along the building’s perimeter. The structure itself is worth a visit, but the trains are also exquisite, with distinctive lettering and exuberant decoration. Smaller exhibitions present railroad uniforms, china service, and toy trains. 901 W. Pratt St., [410] 752-2490; daily 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Mount Vernon Place

This famous square in the center of the downtown arts district has a solidity and sense of enclosure that makes it feel like the city’s spiritual and architectural core. Slightly raised, and capped by the Washington Monument, the surrounding cobblestone streets create a plaza that is wholly 19th century in feeling. just off the square is the extraordinary George Peabody Library, which opened in 1878; its six-story book-lined atrium space, frequently used for ceremonial events, is the epitome of erudite grandeur. Don’t miss the library’s stacks–made of cast-iron columns and railings, they contain over 200,000 volumes. Across the street, the Walters Art Museum has an impressive collection of Renaissance paintings, Egyptian artifacts, antique books, illuminated manuscripts, and armor. At the north end of the square, in a slightly less distinguished setting, is the Museum of incandescent Lighting, a basement-level gallery devoted to the brightest moments in the history of bulbs and filaments, Mount Vernon Place and Washington place.

Cone Collection, Baltimore Museum of Art

The Cone Collection is the legacy of Etta and Claribel Cone, two Baltimore sisters whose regular European sojourns between 1898 and 1949 yielded them over 500 pieces by Matisse alone (as well as numerous works by other Late-19th-and early-20th-century masters, including Picasso, Cezanne, Gauguin, and Renoir). The galleries have been recently redesigned and will reopen late this month with a newly installed re-creation and virtual tour of the Cones’ apartment. (For more on the reopening, see Out There, p.31) 10 Art Museum Dr., [410] 0)396-7100, www.artbma.org; Wed.–Fri. 11 a.m–5 p.m., Sat.–Sun. 11 a.m–6 p.m.

ALSO WORTH A LOOK

Hampden’s “The Avenue”

Lovingly depicted in John Waters’s film Pecker, the Hampden section of Baltimore is famous for its residents’ frenzied and all-consuming approach to outdoor Christmas lights, the most spectacular examples of which are clustered around 34th Street. Over the years, Hampden has developed a concentration of about a dozen used furniture and retro housewares shops (particular favorites are David’s Used Furniture and Fat Elvis). Though Hampden is truly low-budget and dirty, the city seized upon this flicker of commerce, introducing a “Hampden Jitney” for local transport and adding “The Avenue” as a kind of distinguishing suffix to each of the street signs. The Avenue (W. 36th St.), Hampden.

American Visionary Art Museum

Under the term “visionary art,” this eccentric museum gathers together the work of self-taught individuals, including “outsider” artists, mental health patients, and folk artists. Its 35,000-square-foot space combines a historic elliptical three-story industrial building with new architecture and lots of appropriately quirky details, like inventive ironwork. Exhibitions revolve around distinct themes, such as the Apocalypse or love, and the earnest interpretive material represents “visionaries” as cultural heroes, often at odds with the values of mainstream society. Situated on Federal Hill overlooking the harbor, the museum–and especially its Joy America Cafe, which faces directly onto the city’s iconic Domino Sugar sign–is one of the best places to watch passing ships. 800 Key Hwy., [410] 244-1900; Tues.-Sun. 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

WHERE TO STAY

With elaborate themes like the Print Room or the Explorer Suite, Mr. Mole, a bed-and-breakfast in a rowhouse on Bolton Hill (1601 Bolton St., [410] 728-1179, doubles from $115) holds Maryland’s only Mobil 4-star award for a B & B. But you have to appreciate the “bed-and-breakfast” scenario in the first place to really enjoy a stay. / Less intimate options include Henderson’s Wharf(1000 Fell St., [410] 522-7777, doubles from $179), which is also a B & B but one that feels more like a traditional hotel. Located on the water in Fell’s Point, the hotel offers all rooms at ground level, and guests look directly out to the harbor. In the same neighborhood, Admiral Fell Inn (888 South Broadway, [410] 522-7377, doubles from $215) features historically minded hunter-green walls, brass lamps, and antique four-poster beds.

WHERE TO EAT

A swinging interior by local architect Brian Swanson makes Atlantic (2400 Boston St., [410] 675-4565) one of Baltimore’s most appealing destinations for fresh seafood. The dramatic loftlike space, a former tin can factory, attracts a youngish set undeterred by the high noise levels. Swanson used a wide palette of trendy materials, shapes, and colors, and the stylishness is gratifying in a city so consumed with its historical legacy. / Stepping through the doors of Werner’s Restaurant (231 E. Redwood St., [410] 752-3335), a gem of a diner in the financial district, you are transported to Baltimore circa 1940. Its original wooden banquettes and brushed aluminum fixtures are virtually untouched. The food is okay, too, but the place is open only for lunch on weekdays. / The Woman’s Industrial Exchange (333 N. Charles St., [410] 685-4388), another authentically Baltimore eatery that can be appreciated more for its atmosphere than its culinary majesty, is located on the city’s cultural axis. The restaurant is staff ed exclusively by women, and both the food preparation and service (breakfast and lunch in a tearoom/diner atmosphere) tend toward the pre-service era. It’s friendly, but it’s not Friendly’s.

STOCKING UP

One of Baltimore’s best shopping assets is a row of antique stores that run along the 800 block of North Howard Street, and while the vitality of these stores has diminished over the past five years, they’re still worth a visit. / Around the corner, on Read Street, is a well-stocked collection of drawer pulls and other bathroom niceties at Designers Hardware. The range and quality make the store a haven for the difficult-to-please bath and shower set. / For contemporary housewares and excellent modernist jewelry, visit The Store Limited, located in the suburban-feeling Cross Keys shopping center (24 Village Sq. [410] 323-2350) An excellent “gifting” destination, The Store stocks toys and books as well as all kinds of design porn objets. Less familiar to design-shop aficionados will be the modernist jewelry designs of Baltimore favorite Betty Cook. / A few blocks up Key Highway from the harbor are two very good sources for antiques: The Antique Warehouse (1300 Jackson St., 410] 659-0663), where 35 dealers clus ter in a warehouse-like space, and The Antique Center at Federal (1220 Key Hwy., [410] 625-0182), with 10,000 square feet of independent dealers. Practically adjacent, these two complexes specialize in historic pieces, though there are flickers of postwar modernism in both. But gone are the days when Baltimore was filled with Eames chairs for $20!

Since the postwar era of chronic housing shortages, Japan’s cities have been littered with dingy, hole-in-the-wall real-estate offices, where renters go to survey the invariably cramped offerings. Typically these are storefront establishments whose windows are plastered with floor plans. Inside they offer symposia of mismatched furniture, dirty ashtrays, and brutal fluorescent lighting.

But in the last few years, the Japanese rental market has been infiltrated by a new demographic of design-conscious 18-to-3o-year olds who, weaned on MTV, are most at home in the overtly styled, image-suffused landscape of popular culture. This global-minded generation inspired Leopalace World 21(LW), one of the largest real-estate operations in Japan, to change the look of its facilities.

In 1997 the company hired Australian-born, Harvard-trained architect Riccardo Tossani, who’d designed projects in America, Europe, and Asia–including a resort in Guam for the company 10 years before– and charged him with developing a fresh approach for the emerging market. After LW decided to consolidate its several rental facilities in each of three cities–Tokyo, Fukuoka, and Osaka–Tossani’s first step was to persuade the company to expand its services. “It was completely experimental,” says the designer, who claims the university student union as his inspiration. “I applied the idea of a youthful multipurpose gathering spot–a hip place with meeting areas, eateries, Internet access.” In Osaka and Fukuoka, where LW recently rolled out the new designs, Tossani sought to captivate visitors with unusual surfacing materials, supergraphics, loud rock music, plentiful monitors, and full-size mock-ups of typical LW apartment rooms furnished with designer products.

To draw attention and foot traffic to the Osaka LW, a nine-story office building totaling 18,900 square feet, which is set back from the street, Tossani paved the ground-level space with glossy blond terrazzo tiles and installed numerous ceiling spotlights, ensuring a bright white interior. The only color in the gallery-like shell comes from an eight-foot-high partition featuring enormous, close-cropped young faces and a massive multipanel screen playing music videos. Tossani chose Ron Arad’s rippled Tom Vac chairs to reiterate the horizontal banding of custom-designed molded wood surrounding the screen. And the jagged edge of h is freestanding staircase makes a strong visual impact emerging from a triangular ceiling cutout.

Tossani’s variations on the leopard, the company’s logo, is a key aspect of the Osaka facility. Small metal leopards protrude through portions of the street-level facade, and as visitors climb the narrowing stairs to the second floor, they again encounter the motif, reduced to its streamlined essence in blackwood. The second floor is where contracts are signed, so Tossani created a darker, more serious environment there, by introducing rosewood as the dominant surfacing material. A half moon rosewood-and-leather couch of his own design breaks up the void and divides the space. Freestanding illuminated computer podiums endow it with a calm, museum-like atmosphere.

Reflecting the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, the Osaka LW’s upper levels are increasingly formal. The third floor houses a VIP lounge, where the elevator doors open onto rosewood-paneled walls exhibiting photographic portraits of major investors. A remodeled spiral stair on the eighth floor leads to the VIP dining area on the ninth, a bright space with alternating panels of white stained wood and terrazzo that continue up the walls, morphing into display panels.

For LW’s Fukuoka location, completed three months after Osaka’s, Tossani exploited the district’s busy street traffic by erecting a one-story-high mosaic leopard sculpture of his own design at the entrance. The sculpture functions not only as a marker for the LW office but also as a monument where people meet.

Inside, the designer accommodated multiple activities in a 10,400-square-foot two-story facility, while maintaining the LW corporate identity he’d developed for Osaka. With strategic modifications, he repeated the wall-sized supergraphics representing typical LW clients, the multipanel video screen, and clusters of jewel-colored monitors. But in contrast to Osaka’s first-floor white-out, Tossani used bold black-and-white terrazzo in Fukuoka to delineate the meeting area from the carpeted computer-browsing zone, both of which he set off from the leasing tables by a custom-made synthetic fabric wall, backlit to silhouette the staff.

Wall panels of purplewood–a tropical hardwood with natural white striations–add graphic interest to Fukuoka’s main floor. And Tossani designed an airy tubular lattice frame for the staircase, which allows continuous sight lines. When viewed from below, the structure’s mirrored underside reflects the webbed truss, making the stairs disappear altogether.

On Fukuoka’s second floor, in another deft transformation of limited space, Tossani installed sliding glass doors, electric curtains, and a screen to create a presentation room that dissolves back into the public area once the doors and curtains are retracted.

A great deal of technological hardware is installed throughout both the Osaka and Fukuoka facilities, but it is seamlessly incorporated into the furnishings, many of which are original Tossani designs. The architect introduced such whimsical details as a pack of computer mice running up the wall in one corner of the Fukuoka facility.

While much of the surfacing materials and technology he used appears expensive, Tossani kept remodeling costs low by working closely with contractors and subcontractors. Osaka’s 106,000 yen per square meter ($80 per square foot, including all mechanical and electrical costs) is markedly cheaper than the country’s average commercial design budget of between 150,000 and 240,000 yen per square meter ($113 3 to $181 per square foot). And Fukuoka’s bargain basement 95,000 yen per square meter ($72 per square foot) was a direct result of Tossani’s discovery of a cache of the magical purplewood on a warehouse shelf, abandoned because the very white stripes that caught his eye were considered flaws by other designers.

To be sure, no other leasing office looks comparable in Japan’s real estate industry. But LW’s post-renovation success indicates that similar facilities will become spiffier. Even Japanese realtors have to watch their MTV if they want to stay competitive in the real world.

IN SHELTER LINGO, “ELEGANT” usually conjures up sumptuous trappings with no-expense-barred finishes. But it can also refer to dressed-down design solutions more notable for ingenuity. A residential renovation on Cape Cod, recently completed by Boston-based Kennedy & Violich Architecture, is a case in point. Working with a constrained budget and an existing footprint, the firm transformed a bland twin set of bungalows into a bright, modern dwelling that now boasts an unexpected feeling of spaciousness.

After a prolonged search, KVA’s client, a professional couple, bought property for a second home near a scientific research community. A sanctuary surrounded by trees and perched on a hilltop, the house looks out over a pond at the back of a pie-shaped plot. The site is remarkably private, considering the proximity of neighbors, and offers a tranquil buffer against village traffic. Accessible by a circular drive near a small harbor, the house is close to the shore, though the ocean is not in direct view.

The house on this picturesque site was assembled in the early 1980s from two Acorn modules, a brand of prefabricated (or in the manufacturer’s term, “pre-engineered”) structures now produced with a former competitor, Deck House Inc. Today the line may be larger and more stylistically varied, but the company’s mission remains the same: providing customized homes without the expense of building from scratch or paying professional fees. In this case, however, the house was inefficiently laid out and visually bland inside. At best, the unpretentious exterior suited the context of vernacular Cape Cod architecture without distracting from the plot’s spectacular topography. So KVA worked from the inside out, creating an integrated space where, according to one of the clients, “we could unwind and feel calm…a simple, modern, and serene place that eliminates the barrier between inside and outside.”

KVA approached this project with the same concerns they apply to their award-winning designs for institutions. Principal Sheila Kennedy explains, “What makes us different from other studios is that we have a very pragmatic commitment to building, but at the same time we are interested in exploring a set of research issues…. In our work, invention resides in a critical revision of what already exists.” Specifically, she and partner Frano Violich concentrate on new uses for extant spaces within infrastructure typically ignored by architects and more often the province of engineers. Iconic KVA projects include a library nestled in a landing at an elementary school, a gallery addition featuring a multi-purpose plywood ramp with embedded circuitry, and a luminous museum sited underneath an interstate highway.

Kennedy’s research on the Cape Cod project revealed that many spaces within the Acorn’s interior, as in other wood frame buildings, were underutilized. There were impractical storage areas and inaccessible attics, and fully 15 percent of the cubic volume was trapped as gaps within the wall structure. “We decided to find th e hidden parts of this suburban house and make them more mysterious by turning them into a landscape,” Kennedy says. KVA eliminated the living area’s oppressively low-hung ceilings and replaced them with custom-perforated metal panels. The resulting scrimlike surface opens up the module’s full cubic volume, exposing the space under the pitched roof. Depending on the viewer’s perspective, as well as on lighting and weather conditions, the ceiling dissolves from one level of translucency to another.

Approached at an angle, it initially looks opaque, directing one’s line of vision horizontally toward the windows. But when seen from below, the same scrims suddenly becomes transparent, revealing cloudscapes through skylights by day and a handsome white-on-white composition of trusses at night.

Kennedy points out that this permeable membrane is not merely for visual effect; it also improves ventilation with the aid of an extracting fan that draws air through the perforations. Another practical matter was to bring the house up to current local building standards. After the hung ceiling was removed, the contractor reinstalled insulation under the roof and covered it with sheetrock. To make the exposed roof infrastructure more presentable, they sprayed the entire area with a uniform coat of white industrial paint before hanging the perforated paneling. Based on the clients’ input, KVA chose to powder-coat the panels an off-white, brightening the room and disguising any suggestion of a metal surface. With exis ting plumbing in place, the kitchen could not be extensively reconfigured or moved from its corner of the squarish wing, so they opened up the surrounding L-shaped living room by introducing illuminated translucent walls. The frosted glass panels transmit light in both directions, serving as a back-splash inside the kitchen and a glowing ambient surface in the living room. Inside the kitchen, a skylight hovers over the counters and eating nook and is also veiled by the perforated metal paneling.

A new glassed entrance hall linking the two Acorn wings offers a glimpse of the landscape at the rear of the property. Previously, visitors arrived by walking around the house and entering on the pond side. (VA gave the house a more welcoming presence by reorienting the entrance toward the road. The front door is now approached via a newly landscaped pathway that leads to a short deck. This rectangular platform intersects the hall, reemerging out the back of the house as an overlook. Inside, its slatted deck flooring allows thin shafts of light down to a lower level used for office space, guest quarters, and utility room. Cedar shakes and the deck’s railing also make an appearance in the hallway.

The “private” Acorn wing to the left of the front dooris a little more conventional: it includes two bedrooms, each with an adjoining bath, that retain the living room’s airiness while offering a sense of enclosure. The architects’ most dramatic change there was to transform an inefficient storage area into a bedroom reading nook. Not only does this alco ve provide a bonus space carved out of existing square footage, but it also visually thickens the prefab wall volumes. KVA achieved depth effects elsewhere by introducing wall niches as well as custom built-in cabinetry running the length of the living room with the fireplace at one end and a window seat at the other.

Ultimately, the homeowners’ dedication to modernizing the Acorn house grew out of their distaste for suburban blandness and predictability. Kennedy empathized, having grown up in a 19th-century residence on the Cape, where as a child she was fascinated by a “weird communicating closet” in her parent’s bedroom. On occasion she has dreamed about it as a passage leading to unexplored rooms. From this reverie she segued to thinking inside the box: “Although we may not view a suburban house as high architecture, it still has a lot of cultural associations,” she says. “How do you find modernism in a pre-existing pitched-roof structure? We did it by thinking about how surfaces reveal themselves, abou t spaces that were banished from the typical suburban house but reoccur in your dreams.”

By most standards, Steven Holl’s new Bellevue Art Museum isn’t beautiful. The squat three-story structure is composed of nestled shapes painted burnt sienna. Yet there is something irresistible about the way light pours in and out of the building through skylights and light coves. Located near Seattle, the museum radiates warmth in a wet, gray climate and offers an ambience of purity in a neighborhood of profane dotcom billions. Holl grew up in the Northwest, but he believes that people everywhere, consciously or not, want to commune with the cosmos. And he has spent his career orchestrating effects that bring people closer to a heart-stopping sense of space beyond space. “I am slightly obsessed with the moment that space and light and texture and sound come together to give you pause,” he says. [sections] Holl is among a group of architects who are exploring the idea of the sacred in modern design. Though the practitioners themselves may deny they are part of a movement, and may reject any label defining the ir work, they have created light-suffused environments, both secular and ecclesiastical, that foster a feeling of peace and even surrender to the infinite. Composed with humble or native materials and minimal detailing, sacred spaces produce subtle and complex sensory responses as well as heightened consciousness of realms beyond physical experience. Holl describes the design approach as “getting down to the root of any feeling.”  If the sacred space movement has a figurehead, it is Tadao Ando, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect known for graceful and exacting cubes filled with light. Trained as a carpenter, Ando taught himself architecture by studying the construction of ancient Japanese shrines, temples, and teahouses and by analyzing modernist masterworks. In his Church of the Light in Osaka, he cut a slim, cross-shaped window behind the altar to summon brilliance into the concrete-walled space. “I do not believe architecture should speak too much. It should remain silent and let nature in the guise of sunlight and wind speak,” he has said. [sections] In addition to Holl, a professor of architecture at Columbia University, others who work in the idiom are Switzerland’s Peter Zumthor, designer of spare wood structures, such as the celebrated Swiss pavilion at the 2000 Hannover World’s Fair and thermal baths in Wals; the New York-based partnership of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, whose recent natatorium at Cranbrook features a planetarium-like dome with round skylights; the New Yorker Michael Gabellini, an exemplary handler of subtle gradations of light and precise, finely made interior fittings for private homes and fashion boutiques; and James Turrell, an artist whose light sculptures are widely exhibited in galleries and who now practices architecture from his ranch outside Flagstaff, Arizona. Earlier this year, he completed his first building in the U.S., the Live Oak Friends Meeting House, in Houston, Texas.  The movement has a philosopher, too: the late University of Chicago religion professor Mircea Eliade. According to The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade’s 1957 treatise on the building practices of ancient cultures, architecture, the most practical of disciplines, is deeply rooted in spirituality. Early man would not have thought of erecting a tent without considering its relationship to the heavens, Eliade noted. Doors were positioned to admit not just bodies but spirits, and roof holes releasing smoke from a fire also provided access to starlight.  Eliade argued that modern people are still “unconsciously nourished by memories of the sacred, in camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals.” Those who do not follow a regulated spiritual path may ascribe a special value to, say, a birthplace, the scene of first love, or a building encountered in one’s travels. “Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all of these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality. They are the ‘holy places’ of his private universe, as if it were in suchspots that he had received the revelat ion of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life,” he wrote. [ss] In short, sacred space architecture is conversant with private emotions and meanings. “When we think about occupying any territory,” says Steven Holl, “whether it is an interior or a landscape, there is a possibility of an emotional binding relationship that is not measurable. This condition of the unmeasurable is related to a notion of wonder.” What sacred space architects do, Holl believes, is “get back to the root” of wonder, a child’s sense of the world, often before he or she has a formal understanding of religion or what is generally viewed as sacred. Because art museums are repositories of objects that summon emotion, they represent a logical project type of sacred space architects; and the movement’s emphasis on light and hush lends itself to art appreciation as much as to worship. (Nor do museums have to stretch for religious associations: the title “curator” is based on the same latin root as “curate,” the term for a medieval clergyman.) By their nature, too, cultural institutions have encouraged architects’ experiments with forms, materials, and lighting, at least since the ’80s, when I.M. Pei deposited a glass pyramid on the grounds of the Louvre. Holl’s own glass addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, slated for completion in 2004, will be a row of crystalline light wells rising out of the earth. And last summer, Turrell made a luminous catacomb out of the tunnel that connects the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, to its new Rafael Moneo-designed addition. Ando’s first U.S. building, the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts–a series of concrete cubes inset with slivered glass that will house one of the world’s great collections of cubist works–opens in St. Louis in October, followed next year by the architect’s Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Later this year, Williams and Tsien will complete their Museum of American Folk Art. The first freestanding museum to be erected in Ne w York City since the Whitney was built in 1966, its lobby will feature two staircases, mismatched in size, that taken together challenge the aspirations of the tiny, 29,000-square-foot structure. (Though their symbolic importance is not always intended, staircases bear special meanings in sacred spaces; like Jacob’s ladder, they evoke humankind’s struggle for transcendence.) Sacred spaces are often intimate enclosures defined by their entrances. Holl’s Bellevue Art museum greets visitors with an astral projection from the Hubbell Telescope, and in Ando’s design for the forthcoming Fort Worth Museum, access to an enfilade of cubes will be through an overscaled door. The new Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., designed by Leo A. Daly, is approached via a bridge over a pool that terminates in a large open-air courtyard. Project designer Lori Arrasmith says this space was influenced by Civil War battlefields and the “weightlessness you find lingering where great acts of violence have occu rred.”  A bridge is also a feature of Michael Gabellini’s unbuilt house for the Williams family. Sited in a residential Denver neighborhood, the house will be surrounded by a moat that Gabellini modeled on aristocratic Japanese buildings; crossing bridges, he believes, is a metaphysical token of movement between states of consciousness. Inside, the architect paid special attention to the house’s bathrooms because of the importance of cleansing in sacred rituals. A five-by-eight-foot guest bath on the ground floor will receive diffuse natural light (a Gabellini trademark) via a shaft that rises through the three-story structure to a white glass skylight on the roof.  The gestures and moods of sacred spaces are easier to pin down than their designers.

A Clockwork Orange aficionados will recognize Korova as the name of the milk bar where the droogs hung out when not kicking the stuffing out of homeless tramps. A Russian farmer would recognize it as a word for cow. Parisians will know it as the latest “in” place, a trendy restaurant/bar to flirt in–assuming they can afford the Manhattan-style prices (the $20 poulet roti fermier au Coca-Cola is one of the cheapest dishes on the tres chic menu).

Conceived by TV talk-show host Jean-Luc Delarue and nightclub king Hubert Boukobza–think Jay Leno and Steve Rubell–Korova was designed by Christian Biecher, a rising French architect, whose ten-year career includes a stint as visiting professor of architecture at Columbia University. Biecher took a difficult space–a long and narrow 4,800-square-foot ground-floor property in a standard 19th-century Haussmannian building on the fashionable rue Marbeuf, off the Champs-Elysees–and created four distinct zones, each with its own ambience. From a front cafe area, scenesters make their way easily to the bar, and through the restaurant, ending up in what Biecher describes as a chill-out room. Despite their different functions, the spaces are united, as the designer puts it, by “an underlying homogeneity, involving translucence and luminosity.”

While many trendy modern venues inflict harsh halogen lighting on a consequently pallid, sweating clientele, the glow throughout Korova is natural–via daylight and candlelight–or indirect and filtered. It shines through backlighting or by way of fiber optics embedded in the floors, ceiling, and wall partitions; it beams from spots and table lamps of Murano glass; it pours out of opaque domes in the off-white ceilings; it snakes through neon tubing. Even the sunlight admitted through the front cafe’s opaque screens receives a softening treatment courtesy of the sandblasted Plexiglas beads that cover the cafe area walls.

While the combination of subtle lighting and soft colors with reflective surfaces creates the impression of more space than actually exists, Biecher augmented the illusion of volume with devices such as undulating walls and translucent partitions, deliberately avoiding right angles and other sudden obstacles to patrons’ sight lines.

The most spacious of the four areas, the glass-fronted cafe, is redolent of traditional French bar-tabacs, with their glazed terraces and small round tables, but it is not quite retro. Key to Biecher’s vision for this room is his subtle use of evocative references that fall short of actually plagiarizing the past. Next comes the bar area, a convocation of low ice-green Poltrona Frau-leather seating, pearl-gray and powder-pink Corian tabletops, and a luminous bar front, which casts hypnotic silhouettes of drinkers on the room’s wavy surfaces. The undulating walls change color to suit the mood or even the tempo of the DJ’s music when Korova morphs into a mini-nightclubin the small hours. From here patrons move through the soporific orange of the candelit restaurant to the club-inspired of chill-out room featuring back-litwalls, low ceiling low sofas and light blue leather armchairs and pouffes, all arranged around a circular aquarium straight out of a tacky 1970s James Bond movie.

Although Korova is all up-to-the moment modern it does look a bit like the future as Kubrick, or maybe the Star Trek set designers might have imagined it 80 years ago. And many people assumed when they saw the bar’s name, that Beicher’s concept was informed by A Clockwork Orange, a belief the staff make little effort to dispel. Was Biecher a Kubrick die-hard influenced by the film? Not at all the architect protests. If I was then it was subconscious. Some friends of lean-LuoDelarue came up with the name. But you know they had to call it something”.

Green-minded manufacturer Syndesis is mixing things up with Syndecrete, a natural surfacing material that weighs half as much as standard concrete, but is twice as strong and much more resistant to chipping and cracking. The cement-based, precast material incorporates 41% recycled or recovered materials from industry and post-consumer waste, along with Fly ash (a residue from electric power plants) and polypropylene fiber. Suitable for both interior and exterior use, Syndecrete is available in 11 standard colors and more than 500 custom colors, and contains aggregates such as recycled metal shavings, plastic regrinds, glass chips, and scrap wood  for varying color and texture.

Fresh from the flower garden? You’d probably never guess it, but Dakota Burl Composite, manufactured by Phenix Biocomposites, is made of sunflowers–specifically, a highly engineered, patented blend of agricultural fiber: 85% sunflower hull mixed with 15% resins. No off-gassing solvents are added during manufacturing. Dakota, which resembles authentic burled wood, may be milled, drilled, routed, sanded, and finished; it’s suitable for any interior where the appearance and flexibility of wood are needed. The material, available in 36″ x 72″ sheets in thicknesses of 3/8″, 1/2″, 3/4″, and 1″, comes in natural finish  and can be stained or coated.

The new Sabi floor tiles from Interface were named in honor of wabi sabi, the Japanese concept of beauty through imperfection. Manufactured from post-industrial and post-consumer waste, and durable enough for even highly trafficked areas, Sabi is made of 100% recycled content face-fiber on GlasBac, a 100% recycled vinyl backing. The simple, minimal, and delicately textured 19 7/10″ square tiles are available in 12 muted neutral colorways: peace (medium brown), tea ceremony (light brown), tatami mat (medium beige), inspiration (light beige), tranquility (dark gray-blue), simplicity (medium gray-blue), poetry (black), minimalism (light gray), nature (medium green), seasons (light green), patience (medium blue), and one-of-a-kind (medium beige).

Silk Dynasty began with owner Charles Falls’s visit to China’s imperial palaces, where he was inspired by faded and worn silk scrolls, their beauty enhanced by the passage of time. The company’s latest introduction, Mayan Textures by Docey Lewis Designs, is a collection of wallcoverings manufactured in the Philippines. Woven of abaca and cotton, this natural material, reminiscent of Asian grasscloth, is available in 36″-wide, 25-yard bolts (5-yard minimum order) and 16 color/pattern variations.

Dodge-Regupol offers substance with natural style: Dodge Cork Tiles, installed in venues ranging from The Whiskey Bar in New York to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. The tiles are made from 100% natural granulated cork particles, derived from the renewable bark of a cork oak tree found primarily in Portugal, Spain, and North Africa. Durable and resilient, Dodge Cork offers excellent shock absorption and acoustic and thermal insulation, and is ideal for walls, floors, and ceilings in residential and corporate interiors. The 12″-square tiles come in thicknesses of 3/16″ and 5/16″; colors are natural, light, medium, and dark, available in a choice of three finishes. (Note: because cork is a natural wood product, shade variation will occur.)

Innovations introduces Organics, wallcovering made of 100% organic materials on cellulose paper backing. Organics is available in 10 variations: adzuki bean, cork, diatomite-lite, diatomite-medium, clay & mugwort-lite, clay & mugwort-dark, clay & wood sawdust, clay & charcoal, coffee, and green tea. Widths vary from 37″ to 42″, depending on finish. Because the product contains no heavy metals or PVC, there’s no off-gassing to worry about. It’s also completely biodegradable–and even has built-in aromatherapy benefits!

Dodge-Regupol introduces Ecosurfaces, a new rubber floor collection comprising six new products. One is Econights, a single-ply, non-laminated surfacing material made from recycled tire rubber and post-industrial waste. Suitable for retail, institutional, industrial, and corporate interiors, Econights is highly durable, slip- and stain-resistant, and low in VOC emissions. The product is available in 20 color combinations, as 18″- and 36″-square tiles with a thickness of 4 or 6mm, and as 4′-wide rolls with a thickness of 4mm, 6mm, or 9mm.

From Studio eg, a design and development firm committed to using recycled, reused, and non-toxic materials, comes the Ecowork Reception Desk. Par of the studio’s Ecowork Line, the desk is made of 98% recycled materials. Its work surface is 1 1/8″ greenboard (made from agricultural or certified lumber waste), and is available in 8 colorways — natural, taupe, ochre, evergreen, crimson, zin, stormcloud, and charcoal. The desk’s modesty panel and shield are recycled brushed aluminum. Its legs, of 3/8″-think spun craft paper made from recycled cardboard, come in red, black, yellow, or natural, with a nontoxic moisture-resistant coating. Leg boots are of recycled rubber from shredded tires; casters are also available. The desk is 29 1/4″ H, with lengths from 6′ to 10′.

A fabric that contains no chemical finishes and is completely compostable? Produced with a patented Climatex Lifecycle process developed by architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart for Design Tex, these textiles are made of 76% wool, incorporated for its natural elasticity, and 24% ramie, a compound natural fiber.

Carnegie Fabrics harnesses Climatex Lifecycle technology to make Nooks and Crannies, a natural stretch upholstery (the company also recycles waste selvages and trimmings for felt to be used as upholstery interlining). Ideal for office upholstery, Nooks and Crannies is 53″ wide and comes in 8 colorways, including honey, ambrosia, jam, marmalade, jelly, fruit preserves, chutney, and apple butter.

Designtex is using the Climatex Lifecycle process to produce Moss, from the new William McDonough III Collection. A durable but surprisingly delicate-looking sateen with a soft drape and silky texture–suitable for window treatments or upholstery in residential and contract projects–Moss measures 55″ wide and comes in 16 colorways, including Alpine.

You have to give a place credit for being the source of both the rock star Prince and the Mississippi River. And if you’re interested in culture and bodies of water, the lake-studded Twin Cities area is the place to go. Settled around 1680, sister burgs Minneapolis and St. Paul became milling, lumber, and rail powerhouses in the mid-19th century. A massive building boom resulted in streets lined with limestone mansions and in well-wrought train stations and libraries.

If you’re fortunate enough to visit in the Edenlike spring, be sure to take advantage of the many walking and bike paths. An efflorescence of new restaurants puts the state’s bounty of fish and organic produce to good use. So even if you find the weather a little fresh for your taste, you probably won’t feel that way about the food.

3 MUST-SEES

Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum

More famous for its Frank Gehry design than for its early-20th-century American art collection, the Weisman, with its brushed stainless steel exterior, is summed up in Gehry’s famous quote about the commission: “They told me not to build another brick lump.” The collection is shown in a handful of small, easily navigable galleries and features the largest holding of works by modernist painter Marsden Hartley as well as important pieces by his contemporaries Milton Avery, Lyonel Feininger, and Georgia O’Keeffe. 333 E. River Rd. on the West Bank of the U of MN campus, Minneapolis; [612] 625-9494; Tues.-Wed. and Fri. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thurs., 10 a.m.-8 p.m., Sat.-Sun. 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

Foshay Tower

Modeled after the Washington Monument, this Art Deco limestone obelisk, designed by the firms of Magney and Tusler and Hooper and Janusch for public utility company owner Wilbur B. Foshay, was opened just months before the stock market crash of 1929. Until 1973, the 32-story, 447-foot-high tower was the tallest building in Minneapolis; now it’s dwarfed by the nearby IDS Tower. The observation deck affords views of downtown. 821 Marquette Ave., Minneapolis; observation deck/museum Mon.-Fri. 12 p.m.-4 p.m., Sat. 11 a.m.-3 p.m.

St. John’s Abbey at St. John’s University Located in rural Collegeville, an hour’s drive from the Twin Cities, St. John’s Abbey is one of nine Marcel Breuer buildings (of a planned 22) designed for this Benedictine college campus. Completed in 1961, the structure is notable for its cast-in-place concrete form and a powerful bell tower that pokes over the treeline. According to I.M. Pei, the abbey had the potential to be the most important modern building in the U.S.–if only it weren’t in the middle of nowhere. Collegeville, MN; [320] 363-2011; open during school and worshipping hours, self-guided tour brochure available in the lobby.

ALSO WORTH A LOOK

Walker Art Center

Thomas B. Walker, the lumber baron, opened Minneapolis’s first art gallery in 1879. Now housed in a modern sculpture of a building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes in 1971, the Walker is one of America’s preeminent contemporary art institutions. On any given day, a visitor can see performance art, international films, or a concert. Across the street, the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden –the largest urban sculpture park in the U.S.–displays huge modern masterpieces by the likes of Tony Smith and Mark di Suvero. 725 Vineland Pl., Minneapolis; [612] 375-7577; Tues., Wed., and Fri-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thurs. 10 a.m.-9 p.m., Sun. 11 a.m.-5 p.m., garden open daily 6 a.m.-midnight.

Goldstein Gallery

This little gem of a museum on the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus is based on the collection of sisters Harriet and Vetta Goldstein, former home economics professors who wrote the influential book Art in Everyday Life. Its permanent holdings of costumes and textiles from the 4th to the late 20th centuries are exhibited with a growing assemblage of interior and decorative arts, including glasswork, basketry, and ceramics. 1985 Buford Ave. (McNeil Hall) on the St. Paul U of MN campus; [612] 624-7434; Mon.-Fri. 10 a.m. a.m.-4 p.m., Thus. 10 a.m.-8 p.m., Sat.-Sun. 1:30 p.m.-4:30 p.m.

Minnesota State Capitol Building

Architect Cass Gilbert had a Minneapolis-based practice for almost 20 years before returning to New York in 1899 to begin work on the Woolworth Building. The State Capitol, his Midwest masterpiece, boasts one of the largest unsupported marble domes in the world, and the construction, which the architect oversaw himself, spanned nine years. The St. Paul building is bedecked with peerless statuary and mural work and furniture and wood detailing designed by Gilbert. The nearby Minnesota History Center conducts tours daily. Aurora Ave. between Cedar and Constitution Sts., St. Paul; [651] 296-3962; Mon-Fri. 9 a.m.-5 p.m., Sat. 10 a.m.-4p.m., Sun. 1 p.m.-4 p.m., guided tours begin on the hour.

WHERE TO STAY

Located in what used to be the Ceresota flour mill, the Hyatt Whitney features a lobby with a marble floor, a soaring ceiling, and velvet couches for people- or river-watching. The hotel’s 97 rooms are elegantly furnished with slightly worn antiques and many have views of the St. Anthony Falls. (150 Portland Ave., Minneapolis, [612] 375-1234, rooms from $160.) \ Built on the banks of the Mississippi in 1893 of locally quarried limestone, Nicollet Island Inn resides in the former home of the Island Door and Sash Company. This antiques-filled hotel retains many of the building’s original beamed ceilings, stained-glass windows, and stone fireplaces. A loading dock is now a glassed-in dining room, a 150-year-old wood bar stands in the lounge area, and an old glass elevator moves between the inn’s three floors. (95 Merriam St., Minneapolis, [612] 331-1800, rooms from $135.) \ Reed and Stem, one of the firms responsible for Grand Central Terminal, designed the Saint Paul Hotel in 1910, easily the finest hotel in th e Twin Cities. The Renaissance-revival building offers 254 rooms and suites, a rooftop fitness center, and a breathtakingly grand lobby replete with coffered ceilings, potted palms, paintings, and crystal chandeliers, (350 Market St., St. Paul, [651] 292-9292, rooms from $165.)

WHERE TO EAT

Recently opened by a pair of local restaurateurs, Brasserie Zinc (1010 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis, [612] 904-1010) features plush semicircular booths, professional but un-snooty service, and reasonably priced, if predictable, French classics that are a welcome addition to the sometimes bland downtown Minneapolis dining scene. \ Restaurant Alma (528 University Ave. SE, Minneapolis, [612] 379-4909), a two-year-old restaurant housed in an old brick industrial building near the University of Minnesota, has the peaceful ambience that comes from wood floors, bare walls, and potted trees. An ever-changing menu relies on produce available from local farmers and artisan cheesemakers. \ Across from Loring Park’s horseshoe courts and lake, the Loring Bar and Cafe (1624 Harmon Pl., Minneapolis, [612] 332-1617) serves up gourmet delights from an open kitchen. Mismatched chairs, dried flowers, and towering trees fill every nook of this character-infused spot. It’s well worth indulging in the pricey drink menu to enjoy a ba lmy evening on the bar’s patio in the shadow of the nearby Basilica.

STOCKING UP

Lunalux (1618 Harmon Pl., Minneapolis, [612] 373-0526) is a charming graphics studio selling restored fountain pens and ink, whimsical stationery, and novelty items like handmade books in which to paste in your fortune-cookie fortunes. The building, formerly a ball-bearing factory and then a Rolls-Royce showroom, is located next door to the Loring Bar and Cafe (see above). \ Danish Teak (801 8th St. SE, Minneapolis, [612] 627-9381) specializes in vintage Danish furniture and ceramics. A recent visit yielded a pair of 1950s Hans Wegner lounge chairs for a cool $5,000 and a whimsically striped unsigned loveseat for $450. It’s hard to find and open only on Saturdays, but the hand picked furniture in perfect condition is worth the effort and wait. \ On sale at City Salvage (505 First Ave. NE, Minneapolis, [612] 627-9107) is an entire staircase from a lumber baron’s South Minneapolis mansion (complete with directions for reinstallation) and the brass revolving door from the old Surgeons and Physicians Building. Mo re practical finds include intricate stained-glass panels rescued from Arts and Crafts bungalows and 1950S linoleum kitchen tables in buttery yellow, slate, and emerald green.