A homeowner plans to renovate his Cape Cod-style home without adding a theater until his interior designer convinces him otherwise.

When building a home theater, the interior designer is usually considered the enemy. Often having a complete disregard for acoustical needs and the proper positioning of screen and sound.

Frilly flourishes here, fancy accents there—and don’t even think about visible speakers.

This private screening room, however, would not exist without the coaxing and cajoling of—surprise—the interior designer.

It’s hard to imagine Bill Jones being content with an out-of-the-box home theater—or a media room with a couple of couches parked in front of a big-screen TV. After all, he’s not living the college bachelor-pad lifestyle. He’s an electronics mogul whose 14,000-square-foot Florida home is his castle: a shrine to Art Deco design filled with dozens of works created by the noted masters of early 20th-century style.

For sophisticated design with a total glam effect, Art Deco's alluring appeal defies shelf life. The iconic style, popularized since the 1930s in opulent restaurants, theaters, and luxury ocean liners, is redolent with a modernist attitude that's forever fresh, luxurious, and easy on the eye.

Devout modernists know that perfect form doesn’t merely follow function. It’s function boiled down, stripped bare, magnified and then—this is crucial—honored. Or as Frank Lloyd Wright put it, “Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.”

Art aficionado and patron Homeira Goldstein’s contemporary California home, perched atop the highest hilltop in a tony Los Angeles beach neighborhood, is more than a residence—it’s an Art Deco–inspired museum. Indeed, from the moment pen hit paper to sketch the home’s architectural plans in 1988, Goldstein, who was born into Iranian royalty, knew she wanted more than just a routine home: She wanted a sophisticated, livable, open-air gallery space where her family could enjoy and exhibit its extensive art collection, and host her many arts-related fund-raisers.

One of life's joys is discovering that appearances don't always tell the full story. Particularly in the South, even the most genteel of façades can mask a colorful past. Such is the case with this 29-year-old saltbox in one of Atlanta’s most prosperous neighborhoods of white-columned, traditional brick houses. Anyone strolling by would find it hard to believe that one of the home’s prominent owners fled from the FBI. Another vanished in the night, never to reappear.