Married To Design.(Michael and Alexandra Misczynski)

Byline: Photographed by FranAs.ois Halard.

Despite high-profile clients including the Cruises and the Eisners, Michael and Alexandra Misczynski remain the decorating world's unsung heroes. Hamish Bowles admires their discreet style.

In the living room of Michael and Alexandra Misczynski's 1920s Mediterranean villa in the Hollywood hills, the smell of eucalyptusa strange, intoxicating blend of wood smoke and limeis overpowering. They seem to have felled a stately tree, its branches filling a wide bay window, its silvered green leaves caressing the ceiling. It is the single note of flickering color in a room layered with the ivory, bone, vanilla, tobacco, and honey tones they love. The Misczynskis established their decorating partnershipAtelier AMin 2002, two years after they were married, and since then they have been creating environments that are sensory experiences, where smell and touch are as important as sight.

On a December morning the magical light of Los Angeles streaks the room with shadow and brilliance, catching the worm-eaten wooden floorboards, the barnacled clay of an ancient pot, the worn rush seating of a brace of Francis Jourdain chairs, cement tile the color of rain-washed slate, the limed oak of a Jean-Michel Frank chair, and something indeterminable that turns out to be a Saharan salt tablet (bandaged in camel-hide ribbons). No wonder that Boris Vervoordt, the visionary Antwerp-based antiques dealer, characterizes the Misczynskis' work as "a quest for real materials and patina."

The Misczynskis' house serves as a showplace for their aesthetic. "A lot of people have 'good' taste," says antiquary Amy Perlin, "but the Atelier team is special because of a highly evolved understanding of art history. Their sense of scale and eclecticism is pitch perfect."

"All of our clients have been to our house," says Alexandra, "to see the way we've mixed antique pieces with modern." Such visits also reveal that their studied interiors are not incompatible with the demands of small childrentheir son Miles is three, Henry is a year old. "The antique wood floors only get better when things have been spilled on them!" says Alexandra. When Miles works at his hand-print paintings, he sits in a nineteenth-century Irish cottage chair at a child-size eighteenth-century Italian table his parents found at Axel Vervoordt in Antwerp.

"Our children are our priority," say Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, for whom the Misczynskis fashioned an environment of surpassing chic, so "it was very important to us that our home have a feeling of elegance but also be inviting and comfortable and warm for our children. And the Misczynskis achieved this. They helped us create a home that is a reflection of our taste and of our family." For the Cruise manse, the Misczynskis took the sleek, luxurious, practical perfection of an HermA[umlaut]s Birkin bag as their inspiration, blending a stylish mix of eighteenth-century English and Russian furniture with the work of 1930s furniture artists. "The way they complemented antique pieces with modern pieces brought a warmth and tranquillity to our space," say the Cruises.