Living Room

Greg Cantori plans to downsize when he retires. Really, really downsize. His retirement home is 238 square feet — one-tenth the size of the average new American house — and sits in his Anne Arundel County yard. He and wife Renee can hitch it to a truck and take it with them wherever they go. "It's so cheap — that's what's so cool about this," said Cantori, 52, who envisions a surf-and-turf future, alternating between the house and a sailboat. "We bought the house for $19,000.

Warm air has moved over the Baltimore region, expected to bring highs to around 80 degrees and possible showers or storms Thursday, according to the National Weather Service. Overnight lows were expected in the mid- to upper-60s. Cloud cover is expected for most of the day, with about a 30 percent chance of showers during the day and thunderstorms in the afternoon and evening. Some clearing is expected Friday, with partly cloudy skies and highs again around 80 degrees. Temperatures are forecast to be slightly cooler for the Preakness on Saturday, though precipitation that meteorologists were expecting is predicted to stay south of the area in Virginia.

I've long wanted to add a serving bar to my living room. What's held me back until now is the room's 18th-century furnishing style, which has always seemed to call for something more than the usual mirrored alcove with shelves. Can you help me come up with a suitable alternative?Whether you'll find my main suggestion acceptable will partly depend on your willingness to have a bar that makes do without refrigeration and running water. If that's OK with you, perhaps you'll find my advice appealing.

Jamila Ward and Lionel Jennings had been house hunting on and off for two years when their agent pointed the couple in a new direction: a formerly condemned property in a revitalized area of Baltimore. Some city neighborhoods, just years ago marked by abandoned or deteriorating single-family homes, are becoming places of renewal, with nonprofit agencies buying up properties and renovating them for sale to first-time homebuyers. Ward and Jennings, her fiance, qualified for one of these properties in the Johnston Square neighborhood on the city's east side.

Behind the doors of 10 historic houses in downtown Annapolis, which will open to the public this weekend, the centuries have left their mark on the walls and the present-day inhabitants. The 2005 Annapolis by Candlelight tour, a self-guided tour from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. tonight and tomorrow, offers those interested in architecture and history a glimpse into some of the city's most treasured dwellings. Take George Brown, a film producer who recently moved into a rare 1774 terraced townhouse on 112 Duke of Gloucester St., in a cluster of Georgian residences originally known as Ridout Row. "When my wife and I got married, we went to Williamsburg, and we've always wanted to live in an 18th-century house," Brown said.

SALISBURY -- Walk into Mark and Amy Smullen's house and the chair in the living room will catch your eye.Modern and shiny silver, the steel straight back was made by Mark Smullen, who also crafted a dozen other eye-catching pieces for the couple's home. All are made from metal.There are tables with intricate curves and designs, a unique lamp, television stand, kitchen corner stand and a big bucket that holds wood for the fireplace. He also makes headboards and footboards for beds and other items by request.

Q: I'm planning to furnish a small seaside apartment with some wicker and upholstered pieces. But I need advice about what to do with a dining alcove that is really part of the kitchen, yet is also visible from the living room. Should I try to block that view, or would it be better to make the alcove look more like it is part of the living room?A: Creating a shield around a partition of an apartment is usually a lot more difficult than blending one space into another. That's especially true when the overall dimensions aren't very large.

Q: I want to create a formal look for the living room of my new apartment, but I'm stymied by the fact that the entrance door opens directly to the room. Do you have a suggestion for how to shield the space from the door, so that there's an intermediate area between the entrance and the living room? I'd also appreciate advice on selecting a sofa that's comfortable as well as elegant.A: Your concern over an ungainly entrance to your apartment is certainly warranted, especially since you want to give the living room a formal appearance.

Stroll through almost any urban or suburban neighborhood in the country after sundown these days and you'd be hard-pressed to tell that anybody's home. If not for the street lights, there often are no lights at all. At house after house, darkened picture windows face the street. Have you wandered into a ghost town? Has there been a blackout? Where has everybody gone?To the family room, that's where. Or the "TV room" or the "spare" bedroom cum den. It is in these back-of-the-house spaces and not in front-of-the house living rooms that Americans now live by day and by night.

Q: We'll soon be moving to a condo, and that will mean changing the style of our furnishings. The biggest problem is what to do with a fairly large living room that has sliding glass doors along its longest wall. With the exception of a 10-foot-by-12-foot corner across from the glass doors, there's no available wall space wider than four feet. How are we going to arrange our new furniture? And what sort of pieces would make the most sense in this setting?A: Because the room is fairly large, some of the furniture can be placed elsewhere than against the walls.

Designed by the influential Baltimore architects Edward L. Palmer and William D. Lamdin in 1925 and built in 1928, the home at 101 Witherspoon Road is one of the premier properties in Homeland. This North Baltimore home is built of local stone with a Vermont slate roof, and it has over 7,000 square feet of living space. The property is being offered by Hill & Co. Realtors for $1.25 million. "It's a unique property with one of the largest lots in Homeland," said Mary Lynne Mullican, the listing agent for Hill & Co. "The wrought-iron work on the back loggia is beautiful.

Situated in the city's Bolton Hill neighborhood is a relatively new development of brick townhouses solidly placed among the late Victorian and early-20th-century structures that once housed the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Woodrow Wilson and, more recently, pianist Leon Fleisher. This little enclave within an enclave is called Lions Park Fountains. The two-story houses hug the periphery of an open, brick-paved courtyard with benches and fountains. Large statues of lions guard the entrance to the 1980 development.

Selling a house is rarely easy and quick, but the transaction for the three-story end-of-group brick rowhouse at 200 Warren Ave.e in Federal Hill was just that. The property listed and sold simultaneously, closing for $950,000 after being offered at $995,000. Little wonder. The home was built just five years ago in the same architectural style and detail as the older homes around it. Additionally, it is within walking distance to the Inner Harbor and shops and restaurants on Light and Charles streets.

Old Catonsville boasts turn-of-the-last-century buildings and schools, fine restaurants, antiques and music shops, and a library. But scattered among the Victorian structures are Arts and Crafts-style homes built in the early 20th century. It is in one of these that the Shaw family resides, just blocks off of the town's main street. "We moved here from just two blocks away," said Kelley Shaw, a 37-year-old speech pathologist. "Our [other] house had no driveway and we loved the porches on these old houses.

"Is there any way out other than the main stairs?" I asked. My husband, our real-estate agent, the seller's agent and I were standing in the finished basement of a home in Owings Mills. It was a vast space: a nice bathroom, a media room, a room big enough to waltz in and another room with hidden panels in the walls for stashing who knows what. There was even a fireplace at the bottom of the stairs, creating a spa-like atmosphere. But no, the selling agent said that there was just the one staircase, noting that some people like having only one way into the basement because exterior doors attract thieves.

I had a moment looking around my living room this morning where I thought it looked like a tornado had hit. Maybe it was actually Tropical Storm Isaac. The National Hurricane Center predicts that Tropical Storm Isaac is likely to form in the Caribbean Sea by Wednesday. ( Scott Dance has more on that here .) Who knows if it will end up on the East Coast, but even the possibility of that makes me rethink my storm metaphor. I'm no fan of hurricanes and tropical storm. I grew up in the Houston area until high school, so storm warnings -- and actual storms -- were not unusual, to say the least.

It was not a big television moment, but it was an important one.On the first night of the ground war, NBC went live to one of its reporters in Denver who was with the family of a GI who was near the front of the battle.The soldier's mother and father sat in matching corduroy recliners in a circle of light in front of the television. His sister sat at the feet of her mother's chair. They all tried to talk about the soldier in the desert. They all cried -- the soldier's sister most of all. It was impossible to watch and not share their suffering.

"There's no doubt at all that today the living room is the dinosaur in new-home construction," said Earl Robinson, sales and marketing manager for Ryland Homes. Well, not quite. Living rooms are still around, but getting smaller as family rooms get bigger. "Having done a lot of building in Baltimore and the Washington, D.C., market over the years, I've found that there generally is a hesitation on the part of builders, especially here, to go against convention and eliminate the formal living room," said Joseph Link, president of Marketwise, an Ellicott City consulting firm to the homebuilding industry.

Boyd Duckett grew up a NASCAR fan in North Carolina, played golf on some minitours in Alabama and Mississippi, and has spent the past decade as one of the country's top professional bass fishermen. So he knows something about niche sports and their rabid fans. Duckett and others involved in Major League Fishing - a new joint venture between the Outdoor Channel and 24 of the top fishermen in the country - are trying to appeal to more than the sport's hard-core anglers. "The competition in professional bass fishing is as great as any sport I've ever played.

In Iowan Meredith Willson's "The Music Man," Marian, the River City librarian, spends a lot of time looking for love, while pretending not to. In the end she does, in fact, find it, with a huckster - a man who may be slightly less than sincere. We naturally, and naively, assume it all works out for her, that her choice was sound, that her life will be perfect. A variation on a similar theme plays out quadrennially here in Iowa, where we have the enviable task of being the first in the nation to express our preferences for presidential candidates.