Welcome to the West's best rooms: 19 winners of our first Interior Design Awards

Sunset, Oct, 1992 by Daniel P. Gregory

A great family kitchen

It's a scene and a half. Rap music blasts from the CD player while the whole family jokingly gets in the way of lunch preparations at the cooktop. But it's not just a show for the photographer. This kitchen-family room is where everyone genuinely wants to be.

As juror Tim Street-Porter explained: "It's wonderfully warm and welcoming, friendly." Richardson agreed: "It's a kitchen elevated to living room." Earthy red-orange walls and rich verdigris ceiling squares, prominent display areas for the owners' collection of Mexican and Italian figures, and carefully planned activity centers-organized around cooking, eating, deskwork, and relaxing--draw family and friends (and jurors) with the power of an electromagnet.

Interior designer Lou Ann Bauer established an Old World ambience with a large copper-hooded cooking island; it's like a heart-of-the-kitchen medieval hearth. An existing Victorian-era fireplace is now a pedestal for an earthenware jug.

Cabinetry has a furniture look, with molding and brackets, and details such as door pulls made from fish-handled wood letter openers found at an import store.

When a photographer decorates

"Quirky, inventive ... and pretty" were the words the jury used to describe interior designer and architectural photographer David Livingston's own 600-square-foot apartment on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill. They liked his eye for decorative composition. He says his approach is "studied and random, playful and historical."

You could also say he's simply wearing both career hats at once and creating still-life photography you can comfortably inhabit. In the bedroom, for example, he composed a scene of a black steel canopy bed (his own design), pale blue and white painted wall stripes, a tall 19th-century pine storage chest--acquired from an antiques cooperative, then whitewashed and waxed--and a broad-shouldered mahogany and chestnut chair inherited from his grandmother. With light streaming through the gauzy curtain--made of wedding-dress lace from a fabric outlet--the room resembles a summery cabana at a belle epoque French beach resort.

Livingston arranged smaller still lifes throughout the apartment as a way to organize and display his collections. some are themed, like the map corner above, which includes a cartographic lampshade and map-covered puzzle cubes. Some simply combine random elements, like the assemblage of contemporary houseshaped paperweights made of colored glass and the ornate giltframed antique mirror at right.

Home office in a daylight basement

Functional flexibility, in both furniture and spatial organization, attracted jurors' attention to the redesign of this daylight basement in a hillside house (also shown on our cover). The owners, both professors, wanted to replace three small bedrooms with two home offices that could also serve as sleeping quarters for guests. Architect Sam Davis replaced interior walls with sliding screens and designed two freestanding multipurpose storage cabinets that move on