Deep inside the Wolgan Valley towering sandstone cliffs loom in every direction.

We ride our bicycles towards the morning mist as it rises through scrappy eucalypt tress and parched grasses. Anywhere else, this rugged landscape would make you feel small, insignificant. But here at Emirates Wolgan Valley Resort and Spa it's the tiny details that will leave you feeling like a king.

The luxury resort set over 1600 hectares near Lithgow in the Blue Mountains has just been named the number one resort in Australia by travellers on Trip Advisor. It's an award they take very seriously. It's an award earned through focussing on the smallest of details and making sure they are all just right.

Over lunch in the Country Kitchen Wolgan Valley general manager Joost Heymeijer spots an open balcony door on one of the 40 villa suites. It shouldn't be open with the wind picking up he says and radios for maintenance to come and close it before the wind pulls the hinges. The door is at least 500m away. We can't even see it.

Heymeijer is known for doing this. He started his hotel training at age 11 as a dish boy before becoming a waiter, training as a chef and working his way right up to the top of hotels in Europe and Australia. He's been with the resort for eight years - it's been open for four.

Staff say Heymeijer straightens tables as he walks through the restaurant and can spot a blemish not visible to any guest's eye. You could say this resort is his baby - he knows when one hair is out of place. That hair will be fixed.

So it's no surprise that the rooms here are immaculate. Every single one of the 40 suites has its own indoor private pool - the smallest of which is 7m by 2.5m. The pool is heated with solar power to 27C between 6am and 11pm.

In the lounge room an open gas fireplace is set into sandstone. An old map of the valley slides up to reveal a flat screen TV that can be angled to face anywhere in the room or even the adjoining balcony. The minibar has a coffee machine that not only warms the milk, but cools it for iced coffees.

In the bathroom the attention to detail - to meeting and exceeding every guests' desires - is most apparent. Here the toilet paper is not just folded into attractive little triangles - it's folded and stamped down with Wolgan Valley's signature sticker - the Wollemi Pine. A deep recessed bath sits under the window offering a view of kangaroos, wallabies and wallaroos bounding across the property at dusk and dawn.

The shower is topped with a clear glass skylight allowing naked guests to gaze up at the stars at night and to watch wisps of grass caught in the wind during the day.

Read more here:
Inside Australia's number one resort

For about 30 years, the Coval House has stood on a wooded, 5-acre estate as one of Mercer Islands dream homes. Its owners, research scientists Myer and Barbara Coval, lavished so much money on landscaping, rooms and a tropical pool that HGTV showcased the home on its Million Dollar Rooms show.

Cathedral-like ceilings are built with wood shipped from the Republic of Congo and Costa Rica. The landscape includes more than 300 trees, an organic fruit orchard and a koi pond.

The amenities of a $10 million pool are so intricate, it took contractors five years to finish.

You step inside, and it just blows you away and the swimming pool room is out of this world, said Linda Chaves, 63, a neighbor whos been invited to the home occasionally for neighborhood parties.

Now the estate is close to becoming the exact opposite of all that: A proposal the Mercer Island City Council says it will decide Monday night could make the property the largest residential development on the island since the 1980s.

The proposal from a developer buying the property, MI 84th Limited Partnership, registered in Washington under Garth Schlemlein, would level the mansion and much of its landscape to build 18 single-family homes in its place. The developer would also chop the top off a hill on the property that is close to a steep slope, prompting some neighbors to worry about the hill becoming destabilized.

Chaves said she imagined the property would become some kind of development because it seemed the Covals had trouble selling it since it went on the market in 2011 with an initial listing price of $15.5 million.

The Covals were devastated by not being able to find a buyer who would invest in preserving the property as is, said David Paul Eck, who spent years designing much of the homes interior. He said they at first refused to believe an appraiser who said only a developer would likely ever take on the property. But after two years of no serious offers, they reluctantly agreed the appraiser was right.

We tried hard to find somebody of a like mind, but the world doesnt turn that way anymore, said Eck. Nobody stepped up.

But because Chaves and others didnt expect the development to so drastically change the landscape, theyve banded together in hopes that the next phase of life for the property can keep some semblance of its last.

See the article here:
Mercer Island mansions fate touches off development debate

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"The true genius shudders at incompleteness--imperfection--and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said."

That's the sort of sentiment you could almost imagine coming out of the mouth of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, but it's actually a quote from Edgar Allan Poe, who in addition to being one of the greatest poets and storytellers of the 19th century, dabbled in interior design theory on the side. But while they agreed on some things, Gropius and Edgar Allan Poe would have likely come to blows about others.

An article over at the Smithsonian Magazine highlights some of Poe's more interesting theories on interior design, as written in his essay "The Philosophy of Furniture," originally published in May 1840.

Decrying the homes of Americans as representing a tasteless "aristocracy of dollars" and the Dutch as a people "with a vague idea that a curtain is not a cabbage," Poe believed that an ideal room was one in which "every piece of furniture, every painting, and every fabric work together to create a harmonic space." He believed that the ideal room should let as much light in as possible thanks to "massive" floor-to-ceiling windows. Even in the 21st century, these design principles seem decidedly modern: ponderous verbiage aside, you might easily read them as design tips in the latest issue of Dwell.

But he also thought that the choice of carpeting was the "soul of the room," as its color, thickness, and design would influence everything else, from the room's appearance to its sound and stillness. A judge at common law may be an ordinary man, Poe says, a good judge of a carpet must be a genius. Poe felt that, as a genius himself, he was up to the task. But here is where his tastes and that of the founder of the Bauhaus school begin to diverge.

Not only does Poe believe that the carpet of the ideal room must be crimson, but so should the glass in the windows and the drapes covering them. In fact, Poe's ideal furnishings were almost entirely crimson and gold, from the upholstery to the gilt-work encircling the walls. Even the centerpiece of his ideal room, an octagonal table, could only be "formed altogether of the richest gold-threaded marble." So much for eschewing the aristocracy of dollars.

Poe also had, er, intriguing ideas about the sort of paintings you should hang in a room. The frames must be extremely broad, richly carved similarly massive, being finished with the "lustre of burnished gold." The paintings themselves should be as big as possible, since "diminutive paintings give that spotty look to a room, which is the blemish of so many fine work of Art overtouched."

As for the paintings' subjects, Poe insisted only that they be "warm, but dark" with "no brilliant effects." Fairy grottoes, dismal swamps, and at least "three or four female heads, of an ethereal beauty" were acceptable hangings, in Poe's mind.

There's much more, but in short, despite a stated taste for minimalist design, Edgar Allan Poe thought that a home should be furnished in roughly the same style that Tim Burton and the Vampire Lestat would agree upon if they decided to be roommates. That's probably exactly what you'd expect from the author of The Conqueror Worm, but over a hundred years later, it's hard not to imagine Walter Gropius reading Poe's essay, feverish in his Breuer lounge chair and clutching at his heart. "Nevermore!" he might have gasped. "Nevermore!"

Read more of Edgar Allan Poe's ideas about interior design here.

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Edgar Allan Poe: Great Writer, Lousy Interior Designer

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