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Oak cabinets and flooring bring additional woodsy warmth.

Dan Garness used paint and well-placed windows to keep Duane’s office bright and airy.

To make the most of 13-foot-high ceilings that help draw hot air out through second-floor windows and doors, designer Daniel Garness painted select walls with playful color and lined them with maple plywood bookcases. Library ladders (about $1,500 each from Alaco Ladder Company) provide access to reading material and a sleeping loft.

The main living room, separated by a freestanding wall, continues into an open study. The bookshelves, close to ten feet tall, are home to numerous architectural books, philosophy texts, and the literary work of Ayn Rand. Recessed speakers emanate music throughout, dependant on the wills of Jespersens' iPod.

Bauer Brothers Salvage

The living room is five steps down from the kitchen and office space and features textured black slate tile from Olympia Tile, Voyage Immobile sofas with Farniente collection upholstery (a wedding present from Flanders’s mother) by Roche Bobois, and a rug from Turkmenistan the couple picked up in Jerusalem. The sliding glass doors are by Loewen and the glazing above is by Inline Fiberglass. Sawatzky relied on Wayne Arsenault for the custom millwork and carpentry.

Sawatzky designed the bookshelves along the living room wall out of Ikea components: one-inch Lagan butcher block countertops and inexpensive Ekby Lerberg brackets. She also used pieces of the strong and attractive countertops for built-in shelves in the upstairs lounge as well as for trim in the kitchen.

Custom built-in wood shelving adorns the playroom, providing a unique way to display books and toys.

Custom built-in wood shelves provide a unique storage solution and a stylish design element in the kitchen.

On one side of the house, a white central staircase leads to a split-level landing the Robertsons call "the reading room." "We needed a place to hang out and for the kids to read," explains owner Vivi Nguyen-Robertson. Awaiting the birth of the couple's son, she relaxes in a built-in reading nook in the library.

Thanks to a spacious bookshelf and plenty of seating, this vibrant area is an inviting spot to read and relax.

Visiting a Manhattan apartment designed by Tim Seggerman is like sitting inside one of Nakashima’s cabinets, a metaphor realized most fully in an ingenious "library"—really a glorified cubby with a banded maple ceiling, conjured from a free space adjacent to the loft bed.

In a spare bedroom/playroom located in another section of the house, Berg played with juxtapositions of shapes, installing an oak-wrapped, triangular reading nook inset with a circular window.