Room

Many of Judy Templeton's friends call her Columbia townhouse "the whimsical wonderland." She is pleased with the compliment. "This is my little-girl playhouse," said the holistic health counselor who also teaches musical theater and dance. "My home is an amalgam of everything that makes me happy." Ironically, the year in which it was planned followed one of the most difficult periods of her life. Templeton's husband died unexpectedly while out of town on a golfing trip. That was almost three years ago. At the time, the couple shared a villa-style townhouse on a golf course in Howard County.

Barbara Nicklas stepped out onto the balcony of the Spear Center and looked out over Lake Kittamaqundi. "This has got to be one of the best views in Howard County," she said, looking out over the trees and breathing in the summer air. Many longtime Howard countians have fond memories of stepping onto that balcony, drinks or appetizers in hand, during the countless weddings and other celebrations that took place in the Spear Center, a ballroom on the...

The Friends of the Baltimore Hostel know how to warm a cavernous old mansion on a cold winter night. During their monthly open houses, they give tours of the 17 W. Mulberry St. hostel they're restoring, put out sodas and finger food and ask a couple of good local bands to set up and play acoustic sets in a huge room downstairs. The next one is tonight. "We're just trying to get people in and interested in what we're doing with the hostel," said Scott MacLeod, a member of the Friends of the Baltimore Hostel.

Sometimes the best live music clubs are tucked away in unlikely places. The Whiskey 1803 is one of these. Since last November, this intimate space above seafood restaurant B.F. Biggins in Annapolis has hosted some of the area's better bands. With plenty of free parking (always key in Annapolis) and rich acoustics, it's a welcome addition to the local music scene. Last year, local musician David Tieff proposed turning the banquet room upstairs into a live music venue. "I really saw this as an opportunity -- especially with owners that were willing -- right in our back yard to make a place that's not only band-friendly but music-fan friendly," Tieff said.

MOST PEOPLE LIKE SHOW HOUSES because of the fantasy involved. What if I had a mansion and could hire 25 different designers to work their magic without worrying about a budget? Or they go on house tours to see how the other half, the half that has money for beautiful furnishings and perfectly manicured gardens, lives. But if you're interested in home decor, there's a practical reason to visit the show houses and house tour homes that open their doors to the public this time of year. These designers and homeowners face the same kinds of problems you may have in decorating your own home -- just on a larger scale.

State Senate District 21 -- James C. Rosapepe, D-Laurel James Senate Office Building, Room 314 11 Bladen St., Annapolis 410-841-3141 james.rosapepe@senate.state .md.us District 30 -- John C. Astle, D-Annapolis James Senate Office Building, Room 123 11 Bladen St., Annapolis 410-841-3578 john.astle@senate.state.md.us District 31 -- Bryan W. Simonaire, R-Pasadena Miller Senate Office Building, Room 401 11 Bladen St., Annapolis 410-841-3658 bryan.simonaire@senate.state .md.us District 32 -- James E. DeGrange Sr., D-Glen Burnie James Senate Office Building, Room 101 11 Bladen St., Annapolis 410-841-3593 james.

After fighting airport traffic, security lines and tightly packed flights, most travelers arriving at a hotel just want to check in and get on with the vacation. But it's not as easy as it used to be. During the travel slump after Sept. 11, when hotels had plenty of rooms available, it was often possible to arrive at almost any hour and get into a room, and a polite request to the front desk was usually all it took to extend your stay. Now, with hotels at their highest occupancy levels in years, there are fewer vacant rooms available for guests who want to arrive earlier than the typical 3 p.m. or 4 p.m. check-in time.

Marriott International Inc., helped by new hotels and cost controls, reported yesterday a 13 percent increase in its second-quarter earnings.The Bethesda company reported net income of $114 million, or 42 cents per share, in the three-month period that ended June 18. Earnings were pushed down slightly by the cost of year 2000 computer adjustments and in opening communities for the elderly.Without those expenses, Marriott's net income per share would have risen 18 percent.The company's revenue in the quarter rose to $2 billion, a 6 percent gain from the comparable quarter last year.

Visitors to the new state police barracks in Westminster, which opens next month, will notice a striking difference, beginning in the spacious foyer inside the front entrance.Straight ahead will sit a duty officer, who no longer will share cramped space with two communications dispatchers, said Lt. Terry Katz, barracks commander in Westminster. Katz joined William Ebert, a civilian capital projects engineer for the Maryland State Police, on a preview tour of the $3.1 million building last month.

Say "church" and most people conjure images of "sanctuary," "somber" and "formal." For Jim Griffin, the word church means "home."For the past 13 years, he has lived in a converted Dickeyville church built in 1849.The stone building originally served as a Quaker meeting house (then called the Ashland Chapel) for local mill workers and later was used as a Methodist church. In 1960, it was converted to a house, and since then it has changed hands twice. Griffin bought the house in 1986 for $195,000 and has invested $20,000 in repairs and renovations.

Eight years ago, Jim and Barbara Hutson moved from Chesapeake, Va., back home to Maryland to be closer to family. "We couldn't afford the house we sold in Arnold [Maryland] in 1999," Jim Hutson said. "So we marched east until we found Queenstown." And there, just over the Kent Narrows Bridge in Queen Anne's County, they found the development of Wye Knot Farm. A Colonial-style house struck their fancy in October 2001. With finishing touches still incomplete, the Hutsons were able to choose kitchen cabinets and to request a cubby over the fireplace for a flat-screen TV. The couple paid $271,900 for the four-bedroom, 2 1/2 -bath, two-story home and moved in December of that year.

Some people, when house hunting, yearn for "fixer-uppers" and are not intimidated by the prospect of hard work such as hours spent scraping paint, replacing rotted doors and pulling up old floorboards. Such was the case with Katina and Sean Salisbury when they spent $119,900 six years ago on a sturdy Denver-style bungalow in Overlea. "We were young and we wanted a project we could work on together," said Katina Salisbury. "My husband wanted a kitchen to fix up." And so the work began on the two-bathroom, four-bedroom home with a long, narrow backyard.

When Mark Patzschke decided to move, he wanted two things: a new home and lots of room. The 47-year-old information technology director at Maricom Systems found grandeur in a newly constructed, Georgian-style home in the Harford County area of Fallston. Settling in December 2004, Patzschke moved into his $764,000 dream home in January 2005. With a new year and a new beginning ahead of him, he set about furnishing the Colonial's 6,700 square feet of interior living space. The first task was to add color to the open layout.

Baltimore's city-owned convention hotel opened to much fanfare and high expectations last August, with white-gloved waiters serving champagne in the blue-and-rust lobby, a jazz ensemble playing and the first guests marveling at the ballpark views. Tourism and government leaders praised the $301 million, publicly financed project as the much-needed ingredient to bolster convention business and elevate the city as a destination. But within months, the bottom fell out of the economy, weakening demand in the lodging and convention industries.

Set back from a two-lane road in Kingsville, a tiny, frame cottage (think of a little wooden Monopoly house) rests amid tall weeping willows, evergreen and blooming crape myrtle. It's light blue in color, with its windows and front door trimmed in white paint. An American flag gently waves from its metal perch at the rail of a covered porch. Ken Smith, a 45-year-old staff member of Human Resources at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, stands in his asphalt driveway that makes a wide, circular curve toward the rear of the house.

After she'd helped a man who had been shot three times into a wheelchair, after an SUV had delivered another shooting victim and two more men had walked past with bloodied T-shirts covering their wounds, nurse Cindy Barber began to wonder just what was unfolding in the Johns Hopkins emergency room. "Are there more coming?" she asked herself. "Is someone still after them, and are they going to come here?" Ambulances soon arrived with more patients, and by the end of Barber's July 26 overnight shift, police, paramedics, nurses and doctors had scrambled to treat 18 people shot during the bloodiest five hours that any of the first responders could remember in Baltimore.

In July 2007, Diana Ramsay and her partner, Michael Greene, purchased a home that would transport them from city to county - from vertical to horizontal. Putting their 15-foot wide, three-level rowhouse with rooftop deck in Federal Hill behind them, they jumped headfirst into a new lifestyle in the form of a sprawling ranch home in Ruxton. "We wanted a home that would be special not only for us, but also for family and friends," Diana Ramsay said. "The home needed to feel like a sanctuary with multiple outdoor areas for social gatherings."

Even in Nora Roberts' world, truth can be stranger than fiction. In the best-selling author's books, the smart, sexy heroines solve crimes, rescue loved ones and always get the guy. And in mountainous Western Maryland, Roberts' new boutique hotel has just as improbable - and rose-colored - a back story. As a longtime resident of nearby Keedysville, Roberts watched the old inn on Boonsboro's main street, which dated from the 1790s, slowly decline. In 2007, the romance novelist and her photographer husband, Bruce Wilder, who has run the Turn the Page Bookstore Cafe across the street for more than a decade, decided to fix up the old three-story inn, turning it into a romantic, B&B-style boutique hotel.

As Isabella Litchka awaits her husband's return from a business trip, she puts the finishing touches on a home project she has been working on in his absence - the placement of crown molding running along the base of the first-to-second-floor staircase. "I can't wait until my husband comes home and sees [this]," said the 57-year old, semi-retired teacher. It is not that she is refurbishing an old home. On the contrary, she and her husband, Peter Litchka, a professor at Loyola College, purchased their new three-story town house in the northern Baltimore County community of High View just two years ago. Empty nesters for many years, the Litchkas fit the familiar story of downsizing to a smaller home in a community that offers amenities such as lawn maintenance, an outdoor swimming pool, and clubhouse with a gym, cafe, movie theater and rentable party rooms.

When Cynthia Sothern bought the rundown white house next door to her home at a foreclosure auction in 1993, she wasn't sure what she was getting other than four apartments. When a tenant moved out, she moved into a sliver of it, then eventually took back the entire house. After more than four years of rebuilding, restoring and modernizing, she had a renovated, seven-bedroom, five-fireplace, 4 1/2-bathroom house steeped in Ruxton history. The property is part of the 100-acre Martinten grant in 1704 by the king of England to John Martin, according to Sothern.