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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.

Lella Vignelli's office is lined with bookshelves. She designed the desk with legs fashioned by sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro. The couple were known to host many cultural luminaries in the apartment, including Pomodoro and philosopher Umberto Eco.

Ben Koush’s studio office faces the street and features a sleek modern desk he designed, as well as built-in bookshelves filled with colorful books and art.

Simpson runs his practice, WireDog Architecture, from his home study, where custom bookshelves line the perimeter of the mezzanine for a storage solution that doubles as railing.

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.

In 2018, Pau Munar and Victoria Rodriguez bought a 5,000-square-foot plot near the beach in Son Serra de Marina, a quiet town on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. Pau, who cofounded local architecture practice Munarq, designed a lumi-nous base there for week-end surfing excursions for the couple. The home, dubbed Son Serra, is clad in marés,a local sand-stone, with traditional lime cement grout.

Architect Lawrence Halprin wrote of his Portland Open Space Sequence that he wanted the eight blocks of parks and plazas to contain "nodes for quiet contemplation, action, and inaction, hard and soft, yin and yang."