Design

Jorgen Evil Ekvoll and Can Sayinli's hand-woven silk rug -- a design called War, depicting a baby surrounded by bleeding bodies, hand grenades and guns -- sold for $60,000 at the Art Basel Miami Beach exhibition in December. Dan Golden's wry cartoons of cigarette-smoking canines, psycho-babbling infants and the Red Cross symbol with the tag line "Morphine Is the Best Medicine" on hand-tufted wool sell for $6,750 each at Eccola Imports in L.A.

Forget salaries, expense accounts or keys to the executive washroom. Employee loyalty is won or lost over the cleanliness of the bathrooms and the amount of sticky goo on the carpet. One in three workers surveyed recently said they had accepted a job -- or quit one -- because of the most basic working conditions. The respondents' chief complaints by far: the state of the indoor atmosphere, the gripes being about either hot-as-the-tropics heating or Antarctic air conditioning.

RESTAURANT diners -- when they can make themselves heard above the blaring music from a chef's iPod playlist, the clatters and shouts from an open kitchen, and the roar of the cocktail drinkers in an adjacent lounge -- are talking about restaurant noise these days more than the food. And the sound of that is finally reaching management ears.

LIVING downtown with limited space to garden doesn't necessarily mean a bleak, gritty landscape, short on plants, with only the urban skyline to stare at. It can be lush and green, extremely livable and packed with fascinating plants. Take a few lessons from the Northwest, where garden designers recently mounted elaborate displays using containers and planters to artfully landscape small urban spaces.

BEFORE construction had wrapped on Vanessa Choy and Andrew Wong's house in Studio City, the rumors had started swirling. The couple were building a halfway house for addicts, passersby speculated. The home was some sort of mean joke on the neighborhood, others feared. One woman screamed from the middle of the street: "You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" The consternation didn't seem rooted in the size or scale of the house, but by its style.

FOUNDED in the 1880s as a Wells Fargo stagecoach stop, the town of Ballard never became the seat of Santa Barbara County, but it's hardly a one-horse town. Here, equestrians and weekend ranchers own rolling paddocks where landscaping often involves little more than split rail fences and hay bales on pastures dotted with conifers and cactus. For Helene Aumont, however, this is a small part of a much prettier picture.

Although U.S. companies' international theme parks contain many of the elements that made them famous, they all have to adapt -- at least in some way -- to the local culture. Consider Disney's learning experiences: When its Paris park opened, it banned alcohol but offered a variety of gourmet, sit-down restaurants. But Parisians wanted their Chardonnay -- and American fare. "They wanted what Americans do: hot dogs," said Al Lutz, editor of the Disney fan website Miceage.com.

When Mark Rios takes the microphone Tuesday evening at a public hearing inside Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, he'll be presenting two very different designs for the new civic park downtown. The first is what his Los Angeles firm, Rios Clementi Hale Studios, calls a "base" plan, for which the projected $56-million cost is already in hand -- paid by Related Cos. as part of its deal to develop a commercial project with Frank Gehry across Grand Avenue from Walt Disney Concert Hall.

For generations, the French upper classes made leisurely weekend lunches in the gardens of their country homes a hallmark of the "art of living well." On languid afternoons, they arrayed long outdoor tables with platters and tart molds imprinted with family monograms and crests; dessert arrived on trays splashed with vivid portraits of animals, and coffee came in pots decorated with fruits and flowers.

"I DIDN'T have a contractor," film producer Lyndall Hobbs says, cruising through a front succulent garden that reminds her of her native Australia. "I did it all myself because I figured I knew better -- even though I had never done anything of this scale before." The result? Workers toiling for months while Hobbs and her 12-year-old son retreated to various parts of the house as renovations moved from one space to the next.