FOR SALE: HOT PROPERTIES!

A man's home is his castle, and whether that castle is a penthouse in the city or an escape in the country, its style and appointment speak volumes about its owner. Sure, you have the right wardrobe, the watch and the car, but the final piece of the jigsaw doesn't fall into place until you've found the perfect home, regardless of whether your lifestyle entails hosting lavish soirees for 40 people or lying around in a Turnbull & Asser cashmere robe eating Ben & Jerry's straight from the tub. In case you're in need of some property inspiration, or have a serious wad of cash to burn, we've rounded up 10 of the most extraordinary residences in the world that are currently for sale. Check the gallery, below, to discover more. 

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ARMCHAIRS!

You might think that, in design-evolution terms, the armchair has come just about as far as it can go. The fundamentals are there, right? Tell that to designers. The chair is where they can really prove themselves. If they come up with an iconic creation, they can enter the pantheon of design greats. 

Think of Mr Charles and Ms Ray Eames' lounger, which held pride of place in Frasier's apartment in the classic sitcom of the same name. (And not as the one that Marty sat on.) Or Mr Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chair, still a signifier of urbane sophistication and design nous almost 85 years after its debut. The armchair will always remain a challenge that designers want to solve. There is still so much to play with: material, finish, ergonomics. There are new technologies to conjure with, new tools to use, new forms to devise. 

MR PORTER's top 10 is a mix of established classics and, because design never rests, a spattering of spanking-new models. The remarkable thing is how radically different each chair is, from Mr Konstantin Grcic's elegant marble composition in three parts to Mr Jean-Marie Massaud's saddlery-inspired perch for the modern power broker. Take a seat. 

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SUMMER READING: HOUSES OF THE SUNDOWN SEA!

Houses of the Sundown Sea: The Architectural Vision of Harry Gesner. For more than sixty years, casual observers and architectural aficionados alike have craned their necks to catch glimpses of Harry Gesner houses of Southern California. There's one hovering on a mountaintop above Malibu, as it poised to take flight over the Pacific. Another is bolded to a cliff so that the site can support a home before the next 60 -foot cliff drops off. And yet another is tucked away on the grounds of the Getty Museum centre in Los Angeles. Maverick architect and inventor Harry Gesner was always drawn to unusual, challenging sites, which called for dramatic architecture and living environments. Houses of the Sundown Sea: The Architectural Vision of Harry Gesner will open doors to these and twelve other intriguing homes, all located in and round the Los Angeles area, accompanied by magnificent photographs by Jurgen Nogai. The book's scope will be broad, using archival photographs, documents and a rich collection of Gesner's own spectacular design drawings, blue prints and floor plans to trace his career from 1945 to the present. Even in Southern California, a region that has been a catalyst for great Modern architecture for more than a century, Gesner's utterly unique designs are outside the canons of doctrinaire modernism. Rather, his sensibility springs from his interpretation of the landscape and the messages it communicates to him after days of sketching on a new pristine site. Inevitably, for a man born an raised in Southern California, his sculptural designs are imbues with the vision of an almost primeval California, derived from his parents memories of the relatively undeveloped paradise of his youth. He is a Modernist, but one whose romantic, idealistic nature has caused his truly extraordinary body of work to be overlooked. Until now.

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MARIO TESTINO ROYALE: A LOOK INSIDE THE PHOTOGRAPHER'S L.A. HOME!

Channeling his Peruvian roots, the iconic lensman transformed a Los Angeles hacienda into a vibrant showcase for his aesthetic—and now captures the results with his own camera.

Mario Testino grew up in Lima, Peru, an endlessly intriguing city of brooding conquistador-era palaces and leafy suburbs surrounded by hills and lapped by the crashing Pacific. Here he disported himself with fellow gilded youths and partied in the grand, sequestered houses of the well-to-do. In these sprawling homes he absorbed the uniquely Peruvian approach to decor, reflective of the country’s layered history, with naïf seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portraits of los arcángeles peering down on roomscapes crowded with colonial silver plates, the huacos artifacts of the Incas, and a jostle of imposing dark Spanish-inspired furniture and sleek mid-century design statements.

More pictures and the rest of the article after the break! 

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REAL ESTATE: LOS ANGELES!

In 20th-century Los Angeles, modern architecture and film-making had far more in common than just prime location. A stream of creative talent that never stopped flowing between Southern California and Europe fed both pursuits. In the movies, German expressionism, film noir, the French New Wave and the American new wave formed a transatlantic chain of influence. The same was true of ground-breaking architecture, as European immigrants, including Mr Rudolph Schindler and Mr Richard Neutra, separated themselves from the inspiring orbit of Mr Frank Lloyd Wright - the Wisconsin-born godfather of the modern architecture movement in the US - and anticipated the genius of Mr John Lautner, whose residential work remains a gift to location scouts in search of the spectacular 

Mr Wright's avant-garde concrete, Mr Neutra's stunning clean lines, and Mr Lautner's extraordinary connections to the natural environment - these signatures are as unmistakable on the physical landscape as they are in the celluloid avenues of our collective imagination. 

Los Angeles offered real estate like nowhere else in the world: an experimental architect's wonderland, in a climate that erased the boundary between indoor and outdoor. For Hollywood, that meant an endless real world, life-sized suburban backlot peppered with structures few set designers could dream of matching. As Mr Jeff Bridges' The Dude remarks to modern-homeowner Jackie Treehorn (Mr Ben Gazzara) in The Big Lebowski, as they stroll through Mr Lautner's Sheats-Goldstein Residence: "Quite a pad you got here, man." 

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