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

Sunset, Oct, 1992 by Daniel P. Gregory

rollers.

Distant city views suggested the distinctive skyscraper shapes of the birch plywood-and-steel cabinets. They are wired for electricity and hold lighting, display and storage space, and bookshelves. One side of each cabinet is hinged and folds down to become a temporary desk, as shown in the upper photograph.

Custom-designed shoji panels--made of wood and sandblasted glass--follow the lines of the old interior walls, making it possible to keep the space open or to divide it into areas for working, sitting, and sleeping.

Davis kept details simple, and accented the warm natural tones of the maple cabinetry with deep red and bluegreen hues of a closet door and built-in box shelves. To unite the room visually, he used red, gray, and white stripes--in chair fabric, and painted on cabinetry and floor.

It's a shrine to wine

The jury uncorked this room and drank deeply from it. Actually, they savored its elemental simplicity and elegant finish. "I've never seen a wine cellar as wonderful as this," said Street-Porter. "It's a jewel in the rough," juror Mary Ord added.

Indeed, with its gently arching concrete vault pierced by twin skylights, romantic copper light fixtures, parallel walls of bottle-filled angled wood racks, and on-site boulder thrusting through the concrete end wall, it seems to embody the age-old magic of wine itself.

Architect Michael Shakespear added the underground wine cellar as part of a re-model and seismic upgrade. The room shows technical finesse in his design for double-deep bottle racks that slide on tracks like library stack systems.

Mixed colors, materials

Kitchen design is like cooking: ingredients are important, but it's how you blend them that makes for memorable results. This remodeled kitchen won jurors' praise for "creative and original combination of complementary materials and colors."

Interior designer Lou Ann Bauer used maple, ceramic tile, and glass, and treated each material as a band of color. All cabinets are maple. Lower fronts are natural, while upper ones are colored with paprika red aniline dye. Glass panels catch the light. Green, white, and patterned tile tie the composition together.

A word from the entrants

You don't need to be an award winner to have important things to say about shaping the Western home interior. Indeed, with more than a thousand pages of descriptive text accompanying the 324 entries, Sunset's first Interior Design Awards program turned out to be a remarkable poll on how Westerners turn houses, condominiums, and apartments into homes.

Entrants were as diverse as the West itself: young couples establishing their first homes, empty nesters moving from suburban houses to city apartments, aircraft brokers who rarely come home, and retired mathematics teachers who rarely leave it. They all offered insights into the process of making comfortable and personal interiors. Here's what their letters told us.

Westerners rise to a challenge. For Karen and John Tietjen of Orinda, California, the challenge was keeping to a strict budget.