From the moment you approach, you know this house is special. You can tell it’s a place to celebrate art.

The owners of the Willow Glen home, Mike and Laurie Warner, are lovers of art, opera, jazz, traveling and entertaining. All are in abundance in the home they remodeled three years ago and featured on the 2011 Willow Glen Lifestyles home tour.

As the couple likes to say, “we turned the remodel into a giant art project.”

Working with San Francisco architects James Stavoy and D.J. Pak, they created a show-stopping entry with a bright red metal window grid. Greeting you at the open front door is a lion statue, set off by leather-fringed rugs on the floor and hanging on the wall behind it. 

The couple are clearly lovers of modern, with an Asian twist. A central atrium with a water feature and bamboo can be see from floor-to-ceiling windows on four sides of the home.

She’s an artist. He’s a retired engineer. And together they have amassed an impressive collection, on display at every turn.

Here’s the complete slideshow:

So, have you been bit yet? You know by the Royal Wedding Bug? My friends are dropping like flies. Facebook profile pics have been changed, apps have been downloaded and alarm clocks have been set. I have to admit when Diana Spencer married Prince Charles, I was all over that. We didn’t have the internet and my parents didn’t even have cable. Do you know how hard it was to get my information?

I’ve gotten some photos of the of Buckingham Palace and thought I’d share. The opulence of the rooms is breathtaking—further confirming I had to have been switched at birth.

Using red silk damask, the walls of the State Dining Room make a proper background for the portraits of sovereigns from throughout history.

A portrait of Edward VII’s wife Queen Alexandra hangs in the White Drawing Room, apparently it is the grandest of the state rooms and it has views of the gardens. There is a secret door leading to private rooms to allow for a discreet Royal entrance. I’d like one of those—no more awkward entrances. The main focus of the reception will be the picture gallery, where the wedding cake a traditional multi-tiered fruit cake will be on display surrounded with works by Canaletto, Rembrandt and Rubens.

The lavishly appointed White Drawing Room will be one of the rooms used during the wedding reception. Can you imagine standing in the middle of it all?

The finest crystal chandeliers hang from the ornate ceiling of the Blue Drawing Room. I believe I’m going to start refering to the rooms in my own home this way—”Get that skateboard out of the Gold Living Room”! It works—doesn’t it?

Don’t you just want to get into this charming English tudor? You can just imagine it’s as lovely on the inside. But hey, why imagine? It is one of five houses, plus a garden, that is being featured in the 2011 Willow Glen Home Tour. And Lookiloos has a pair of tickets — worth $60! — to give away.

Here’s a little advance info about the other homes and garden you will see:

* A remodeled ranch with a wall of windows in the family room leading to a gorgeous pool and yard;

* A southwestern-style bachelor pad with a new kitchen;

* A recently renovated contemporary home filled with a collection of local artwork — and another window wall overlooking a koi pond

* A lovely garden, tended by the homeowner who is a master gardener, features drought resistant plants.  This will also be the setting for a boutique featuring local artist and plants for sale, as well as box lunches.

If you’d like to win a pair of tickets , leave comment below otherwise, please go to sjdn.org to buy tickets that benefit the San Jose Day Nursery.  Tickets are $30 each and box lunches are $13.  Tickets may also be purchased on Lincoln Ave. at Willow Glen Home and Garden, Domus or Grace on the Ave. Tickets are also being sold at Able Printing on Meridian at Hamilton Ave.

Here’s the complete slideshow:

Hiding TVs has been a chronic conundrum for designers, architects and significant others who once tackled the problem in the olden days by tucking them into with furniture-like wardrobes. But 60 inches across aren’t easy to conceal. That’s why Bill Cardoza of San Jose started a business called “The Art of TV,” transforming your flat panel into a beautifully-framed mirror or a stunning piece of digital art formatted to fit your wide screen HDTV when not in use. Mona Lisa on the living room wall, anyone? You can choose from a library of digital images and rotate them as well. A family portrait can also takes its rightful place –integrated into the TV screen. The Art of TV will create a boot that consists of a custom frame and special two-way glass. The boot fits right over your existing flat panel and the two-way glass gives you the option to the display digital art or the mirror. Since each is custom, the turnaround time can take two to three weeks.
And it’s not cheap _ it costs about $3,200 for a 37-inch screen. The TV is included in the price. So, you might say it’s worth it!
And with wives now able to enjoy the look of their husbands’ electronic monstrosities, Cardoza says, “it’s better than marriage counseling.”
For more information, go to The Art of TV.

Walk in the front door of this charming 1940 brick cottage and the front rooms are as traditional as you’d imagine: graceful dining room on the left, formal living on the right. But step through the front hallway and the back of the house opens to a modern, light-filled space.

Phil Health, who works at Nasa Ames Research Center, and Sam Miller, who owns a Mountain View laundromat, bought the house in June 2009, deciding they wanted to downsize after remodeling their big house on a big lot on the Peninsula.

They turned to San Jose architect Steve Hinderberger to update the dated and chopped up space and add a second story with a master suite. The couple wanted sleek, modern lines, but also were adamant about connecting with the rest of the traditional house. Hinderberger used wood detailing in rich stains, but gave modern details, including aluminum accents, on the stair railings and support columns.

The kitchen features green, orange and yellow tiles from San Jose’s Fireclay Tile. While the windows in the front of the house are divided light, the couple used no panes in the French doors overlooking the backyard.

Slate tile floors run from the kitchen through to the outdoor patio, connecting indoors and out. Upstairs, frosted sliding glass doors give privacy to the master suite, but let in light. The master bath was tiled in “boneyard” pieces of tile in different shapes and sheens to give added interest. A neighbor once likened the shower tile to a “bamboo forest.”

They have decorated the house with artwork collected along their travels as well as local “open studio” events. A prized pair of art deco console tables purchased at a San Francisco auction adorn the living room. The couple opened their home to the Rose Garden Homes Tour, benefitting St. Martin of Tours schools.

GreenDesign provided the floral pieces. The landscaping and hardscaping was done by Rodriquez Landscape.

Here’s the complete slideshow:

Prairie style. Tudor Revival. American Four-square. Mediterranean Revival. You name it, the Hanchett Park Historic Home Tour in one of San Jose’s most charming and eclectic neighborhoods has it. They’ll be open for your indulgent pleasure this Saturday, May 22.

Lookiloos has just given away two tickets to two of our fans. I drew names from a bowl! Barb B. and Nancy M. were the lucky winners who each get to take a friend to five fabulous homes, plus a backyard boutique.

 And I’m telling you, as a voyeur from the next neighborhood over, these homes are Lookiloos-worthy! Two in particular resonate with me: one is the one-story Mediterranean revival (pictured above) with an interior courtyard that has always been the style for my fantasy home.

The other is this Prairie style look that feeds my clean-lined-architect’s-daughter sensibility. And wouldn’t you know an architectural designer, Steve Hinderberger of Hindesign, owns it and has filled it with modern furnishings? Here are just a few of the famous pieces you’ll see: a 1928  le Corbusier lounge chair; 1925 Marcel Breuer Wassily chairs, a 1929 Eileen Gray breakfast tabl, a 1944 Noguchi coffee table  and two mid-century classics, an Eames lounge chair and ottoman and a Beroia diamond chair. The art collection is also a must-see, including an Alexander Calder.

 This is another gem — a 1920 American Four-square completely remodeled down to the studs in 2008, with new landscaping last year. The home is decorated with luxurious, contemporary furnishings. 

 This is another special home, built in 1924 for the owner of the old Pomeroy’s clothing store in downtown San Jose. Gilt wall sconces, crystal doorknobs, windows and floors are all original. Enjoy the batchelder tile fireplace and a gorgeous sun room

And if you love a storybook cottage, here’s a charming Tudor Revival owned by artist Margaret Washington and her husband, Austin. It’s loaded with original details, including exposed beams and hardware — and even the original stove!

Hanchett Park Historic Homes Tour is one day only, Saturday, May 22, from 10 to 4.  You can purchase tickets for $20 in advance at Green Design, 1341 The Alameda, and at Willow Glen Home & Garden, 1123 Lincoln Ave. On May 22 tickets are $25 and will be sold on the corner of Hanchett and Sequoia avenues.

"Meat" sign for sale at Briarwood Antiques. Who wants it?

When one of our readers snapped a picture of this “MEAT” sign in the window of Briarwood Antiques and Collectibles on W. San Carlos in San Jose, I knew I had to use it as a centerpiece.  As our gracious reader put it, “Things are getting interesting at the local antique store.”  I’ll say.  If I owned a nightclub, this would be my welcome sign. It’s priced, we think, at about $900. I’ll try to get more info later, including about the gun-wielding guy in the background. Tell me: where would you put the MEAT sign?

She was born in 1970 with a name that means “earth” in Czech on a commune in Palo Alto called “The Land.”
Zem Joaquin was a dark-haired pixie with patchwork pants who played with chickens, danced in the central longhouse and sang with Joan Baez in the squatters camp off Page Mill Road.
The darling of the draft resisters back then, she became the subject of their illustrated fairy tale about  “Zem, the little queen” who unites a strife-torn world. Even Baez, who founded the commune and lived there for a time, included “Zem Zem” in her 1975 song, “Children and All That Jazz.”
Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that she was destined to make a name for herself in the environmental movement. Unlike her parents’ generation that reveled in the counterculture fringe, though, she is helping create a modern movement in the mainstream.
And she’s doing so with her own sense of rebellion: She’s making green glamorous.
Founder of Ecofabulous, she created a Web site that gives readers eco-friendly lifestyle options, from modular furniture made from recycled paper to chic throws made of hemp and flax. Going green needs to be less about sacrifice, she realized, and more about motivation. (The site’s motto: “sexy.sustainable.style.”) After all, she muses, “People weren’t too interested when organic cotton looked like oatmeal and felt like a burlap sack.”
Step inside the 1960s-era home in Marin County that she remodeled for her family and you’ll see what she means.
At 39 years old and just 5 feet tall, she opens the front door with bare feet and a big smile. Behind her, vintage black-and-white curtains she found at the Alameda Point Antiques Faire frame a pair of chairs she recovered in remnant lime green silk. Sleek kitchen counters are made from newspaper wood pulp and fly ash. Her vintage Laszlo dining room chairs are refilled with natural rubber.
“Being fabulous is feeling like you’re getting what you really want,” she says. “At the same time, you’re not taking more than you need and you’re giving back.”
So how did this commune kid become such a design diva?
She may have been raised on granola, but she came of age living in London for two-and-a-half years in her early 20s with her godmother – a stylish critic for the Evening Standard who took her to theaters, boutiques and Paris for weekends and “taught me everything I know about design.” Joaquin (then Spire, her maiden name) finished her degree in organizational communications at Pepperdine, where she started a recycling program. And after a stint managing male models in Italy (she followed a boyfriend there), she returned to San Francisco in the late 1990s to help her best friend, Gina Pell, start Pell’s fledgling fashion and beauty Web site, Splendora.
“She was my VP of business development because she’s so good with people. She has a way of developing and nurturing connections,” Pell says. “I always told her that if she was a superhero, that would be her superpower – the ultimate connector.”
It was Pell, though, who connected Zem with her husband, tech entrepreneur James Joaquin.
They met at a cocktail party in 1999 in San Francisco, married and had two children. She was volunteering for homeless causes and political campaigns when her children were diagnosed with severe asthma. The family was living in an old Craftsman in San Francisco at the time, spending many a night in the emergency room when she decided she had to “save my children and create a healthy home.”
The Marin County house, tucked among blackberry bushes and towering trees, became her eco-incubator. Old painted beams were stripped with beeswax, wall-to-wall carpeting was replaced with recycled wine-cork flooring and solar panels were added to the roof.
But finding sustainable products, and stylish ones at that, wasn’t easy. “I realized there was this enormous gap,” she says. “There were no resources for eco-design and people interested in design.”
It was her husband who handed her a copy of “Cradle to Cradle,” the environmental manifesto of architect William McDonough, whom James Joaquin had heard speak at the 2004 TED conference for technology, entertainment and design in Monterey.
“This is what you’ve been talking about,” he said at the time to his wife, “what you’ve been spiraling in towards.”
She was so enthralled by the book, which professes ecologically intelligent design, that she invited McDonough to lunch with “some of my friends that I think can change the world.”
The guest list included her husband’s good friend, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar; Segway inventor Dean Kamen, whom she had met at a dinner party; and inventor, entrepreneur and Disney “imagineer” Danny Hillis.
This time, it was McDonough’s turn to be impressed. He invited her to attend his annual eco-summit in Iceland the following year with some 20 “thought leaders” and activists.
Unlike some in the environmental movement who preach doom and gloom, he says, Joaquin takes a positive approach.
“It’s a big dark world out there, and we need brightness,” he says in a phone interview from Abu Dhabi where he was talking to real estate developers about green design. “Zem is a sparkle.”
And she knows how to throw a party. Over the past several years, she has raised nearly $1 million dollars for Global Green, an L.A.-based nonprofit that activates its Hollywood base to bring attention to green issues, including the sustainable rebuilding of New Orleans and Haiti. At her first party she threw at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco several years ago, Leonardo DiCaprio showed up. Salma Hayek and Orlando Bloom came to the second.
“She actually seduces people into doing the right thing,” Ariana Huffington of the Huffington Post said when she presented Joaquin with Global Green’s Founder’s Award last year. “She always makes people feel that the right thing is the fun thing.”
Plus, she added, “she’s adorable.”
While Joaquin founded Ecofabulous in 2006 to chronicle her environmentally friendly remodeling resources, she has since expanded it to include organic beauty, fashion and lifestyle choices. She consults with such companies as eBay and Safeway and has been a frequent “green” guest on radio and TV shows. She raises chickens in her side yard, grows tomatoes and herbs, and even has her 6-year-old daughter weighing in with her opinion about kids’ green products. And over the past few years, she’s convinced every one of her closest friends to drive a hybrid.
So what’s next?
“I never thought in a million years I would want to have a commune,” she says.
But lately, she’s thinking about it, maybe bringing her closest friends together, living sustainably off the grid. She doesn’t have the details worked out yet, but one thing is certain: Unlike the A-frames and outhouses she grew up with, she says, “this commune would be stylized.”

Here’s the complete slideshow:

Charmaine Warmenhoven was in high school in 1964 when news of the notorious murder of Kitty Genovese on the streets of New York spread across the country, a shocking story because even though many heard her screams, apparently no one did a thing to help.
Charmaine was fascinated, though, less about the bystanders who did nothing and more about the idea of those who “try to do something.”
With a strong foundation as a woman of faith and a psychology degree from Princeton, reaching out to others in need has become a guiding principle of her life as a philanthropist and educator of special needs children.
“It’s part of our value system,” she says. “You are meant to provide service to others. I’ve been doing so ever since I can remember.”
From the graceful Monte Sereno home surrounded by acres of gardens that she shares with her husband, Network Appliance board chairman Dan Warmenhoven, the couple open their doors to fundraisers benefiting causes ranging from cancer research to local arts groups to Catholic charities. In June, she is hosting the Silicon Valley Heart Gala for 250 to raise money for the American Heart Association. With Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz chairing the event, the nonprofit is expecting the guest list to include some of the valley’s tech luminaries. If all goes well, the charity hopes to raise more than half a million dollars (maybe a million, dare they hope) at this single event.
“Dan and I feel we’ve been given a lot, and we need to give and to share,” she says. “It’s more than a habit. It’s a lifestyle.”
And Keri  Janssen, CEO of the Silicon Valley American Heart Association, couldn’t be more grateful.
“They are very down to earth and very dedicated to making a difference in the community,” Janssen says. “Opening your home to an event is totally different than giving money. They are dedicated to the mission and the cause and have been for over 10 years.”
Hosting the fundraiser at a home rather than a hotel is much more intimate, she says. Besides, “who wouldn’t want to see the Warmenhoven home?”
A winding driveway leads you past oak trees and a sunken Japanese tea garden to the grand estate atop a hill. A 17th-century wishing well and a stone gazebo adorn the front garden that overlooks the lights of the valley below.
The back yard, with terraces surrounding a pool and cabana house, will be the setting for the June party. A saxophonist will play during cocktail hour from the balcony, and tables will be set up around the pool. Each guest will be given a candle to light, representing heart disease survivors, and float them in the pool.
“It will be the feel of a romantic, starry night,” Janssen says.
The causes Warmenhoven supports are close to her heart. As a child, her mother was a concert pianist, and she was a dancer. As an adult, she has served on the boards of Ballet San Jose and the Montalvo Arts Center.
With her father in the military, her family moved around a lot, she says, and going to Catholic church on Sundays wherever they happened to live “felt like family and it gave me a sense of stability and belonging.”
After teaching disabled children for a number of years, she went on to work for  the Catholic Diocese in Santa Clara County, helping people with disabilities feel included in church life. Just last year, the Warmenhovens hosted a garden party for the Knights of St. John, an organization ounded to take care of wounded soldiers but that now donates frequently to children’s hospitals.
Charmaine’s father died of cancer when she was 13, and the Warmenhovens have been supporters of the American Cancer Society’s Cattle Barons’ Ball each year.
“I do a variety of different things,” she says, “but they all make sense to me.”
She and her husband met sitting next to each other on a plane on their way back to Princeton from the West Coast when she was a junior and he was a senior.
“He asked me to dinner,” she says, “and we were married two years later.”
After moving around the East Coast with his jobs for IBM and HP and hers in teaching, they arrived in Santa Clara Valley in the early 1980s. In the mid-1990s, Dan Warmenhoven became president and CEO of Network Appliance, employing 45 people at the time. It has since grown to 8,000 employees worldwide.
The Warmenhovens moved from their house in Saratoga, which their son and daughter-in-law now own, to the Monte Sereno estate three years ago. Even though the house is grand, the rooms feel intimate. And she loves the indoor/outdoor flow of the house, which is perfect for entertaining.
She enjoys planning gatherings for her family and close friends, but she leaves the big parties to the pros. She has her list of favorite local party planners, florists and caterers.
“I just sit back and applaud,” she says, “and open the door.”

Here’s the complete slideshow: