Homeowner Erin King, a landscape designer, and her husband Matt are living in a beautiful residence in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Santa Monica. Designed by John Friedman Alice Kimm Architects, the 316 sqm house seems to mimic the greenery around and lets it seep into the lavish interiors when exposed to natural daylight. The four-bedroom, four-bath house is one mile from the beach. It has a large front yard,several broad glass doors that lead to the dining room and another set of glass doors allowing your entry into the main living area and kitchen. With 10-foot ceilings, large horizontal windows and frosted glass doors that welcome daylight in, the King Residence’s front patio and luxury dining area definitely lead to a communally-oriented lifestyle. We love the large bedroom, the bathroom and the upper terrace. Priceless!

Standing 300 meters above sea level and overlooking the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Naples, the Capri Palace Hotel and Spa has always been ogled as a perfect holiday destination by the celebs for its innately modern Italian charm. The 5 stars luxury spa hotel situated in Anacapri, the village on the island of Capri, Italy, is enclosed within the Capri Beauty Farm. It has 85 rooms, bar, childcare, concierge, gym, pool and 3 restaurants. While having a stay here, you can enjoy your own private garden, a heated swimming pool, 5 luxuriously furnished suites, guest rooms with chandeliers and marble baths. Moreover, the hotel receives its guests with Mediterranean food, homemade bread, pasta and desserts. Enough for your picky tastes? It certainly blown us away!

We have been covering furniture designs for quite some time now. Where some of them uphold the age-old practices of regular designs, there are still others who defy the notions of mundane utility while taking them altogether to a different new level. The Binta armchairs, by the Swiss designer Philippe Bestenheider surely deserve a place in the latter class for their striking African color schemes. Part of the Moroso Collection, the colorful seats saw daylight at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan where they got the eye for their unparalleled patchwork fabrics and their colors. Crafted in polyurethane rubber and wax fabrics, the chairs have trunk-like feet mimicking a baobab tree. We guess you’ll like flaunting the superb range in your guest room; maybe, one of these.

Located in one of Brisbane’s finest at 336/90 Wynnum Road Norman Park just 2km from the CBD and the Oxford Stree, this executive riverside hideaway is a 196m2 apartment with high-quality facilities. Settled among first-rate surroundings and offering a spectacular view of the river and the Brisbane Powerhouse complex, the live wire balconies allows one to feel a sort of belonging to the hinterland. The interior plan allows sufficient space for a streamlined kitchen, a slim-line master suite, a media room that can be changed into a family room (with some modifications), and an angled dining room. For a fitness freak, it has a lap pool and a high-tech gym. Dream home for sale by Judy Goodger.

Melanie Hall is both the owner and the interior designer of a stunning private beachfront hotel in Bali, Indonesia. Dubbed the Luna 2 Private Hotel, the “funk’d up modernism” project has been refined by David Wahl of Wahl Architects to project the influences of the past century. The reason why the Luna 2 is called a private hotel is because it only entertains only one guest at a time. Strictly meant for an elite clientele, it has a terraced front patio with a stocked pond, a 20-metre lap pool and the Bisazza mosaics depicting Marilyn Monroe with her incredible smile. A tremendous job to bring European inspiration into the Indonesian architecture, the Luna2 Private Hotel makes for the ideal vacation spot for the super rich.

It seems as if Aussies have no dearth of timber as their architectural and interior decoration practices revolve around this superfluity to a considerable extent. A great example is the lavish Yarra House designed by Leeton Pointon architects and Susi Leeton architects, close to the Yarra River in Melbourne. Keeping natural lighting as the focal point of the entire design, the luxurious residence charms with its radiance via the double-story void, light cascades down oak and white plastered surfaces. Other than great skills in fashioning the Yarra House, we’ll have to acknowledge the illusiory external crafted-in-concrete view of the fabulous home. Stunning to say the least!

The island city of Santorini in Greece is famous not only for its beautiful beaches but also for equally marvelous hotels and lodges. Standing proud on Oia’s famed cliffs, Mystique is one such hotel. Located just 18 kilometers from the Santorini Airport and 20 kilometers from the Athinios Port, at Mystique you can watch the blue equatorial waters providing an ideal background to the volcano and the Aegean Caldera. It has 18 suites and villas with a contemporary design.

As for those who rate luxury beyond everything else, there is an outdoor infinity pool at the cliff’s edge, the Charisma gourmet restaurant, the poolside Aura bar and the Secret Wine Cave. Last year, the hotel was the proud recipient of the Travel & Leisure Design Award 2008 for the Best Small Resort in the world. Deservingly, we must say.

The Indians are sociable people. Be it an individual, a family or the community – they always seek to unite with the next level. That’s the reason why houses are generally bigger than elsewhere in the world. Same is the case with the beautiful home called N85 Residence, situated in India’s capital city, New Delhi. Glass panels, water, reflection, and modulated lighting: all join forces to offer transparency to the fabulous house designed by Morphogenesis. Even at nights, it’s no different as the magical aura of a lovable living place allows onlookers to feel the ambiance.

The house has three distinct levels: the private domain comprising bedrooms and breakfast room, the family room, kitchen and dining areas, and a public domain characterized by the lobby and living spaces. The forecourt with pools, large picture windows, circular skylights lining the ceiling, an interior garden below, and a lap pool fed by harvested rain water are just a glimpse of the elegance of the massive house. Well, since Indians can never deem a place to be inhabitable if it’s lacking a courtyard, it has one to perfect all prerequisites.

The creative designers from Bittoni Design Studio have recently completed a modernist community house project in Los Angeles, California. Dubbed the Evans House, it’s a successful attempt to remodel a building into something a lot more contemporary to get the eye. One of the key points of the project was to shape an elevated space on top of the kitchen so that it’s not disconnected from the remaining part of the room. In South California, even though indoor/outdoor living is taken for granted in a big way, the elevation of the site made it a lot easier to connect to the atmosphere than to the landscape. Looks like a piece of art influenced by the sky. We love it!

The Ludwig Penthouse in San Francisco, California, has earned a great reputation not only for its wonderful location, but also for its equally stunning interiors. The creative designers from Craig Steely Architecture have simply left no stone unturned in beautifying this 4 bedroom/4-bath penthouse on the inside. Redesigned to allow its occupants utilize natural daylight through out the day, it stuns with its timber floorings, pebbles finishings, the extensive use of glass, Black walnut and gun blued steel. And with all that exquisite furniture and those daring bathrooms around, we wouldn’t mind living a few years in here. How about you?