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"Elissa Cullman\nelegant traditional rooms embrace east and west\n\"Whatever you see and learn over the years naturally becomes a part of your designs,\" says Elissa Cullman.\nHer 1998 layout for a Long Island Sound house's entrance hall.\nThe Long Island Sound house's entrance hall echoes the aesthetic of one that Robert A. M. Stern created in 1995 in an East Hampton residence (above). \"He's taught me so much about architecture and light.\"\n\"I've always been enamored with folk art,\" notes Cullman, who counts as one of her influences the 1804 Stencil House at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont.\nShe placed a framed sampler against a simply stenciled wall in a guest room in the house on the Sound.\nCullman based the design of her own formal dining room in Manhattan on the Chinese Parlor at the Winterthur Museum.\n\"I wanted my guests to be enveloped by 18th-century Chinese wallpaper panels of village scenes, just like they'd be in that wonderful space.\"\nElaborate plaster work embellishes the red drawing room at Hopetoun House, near Edinburgh, Scotland, which Robert and John Adam completed in the 1750s. \"I'm a traditionalist, and I admire Robert's attention to proportion and detail. I especially like his ceilings and mantelpieces.\"\nCullman drew inspiration for a client's 1997 Manhattan living room from the \"beautifully paneled\" library that her friend and mentor Benjamin Sonnenberg had in his famous Gramercy Park house. \"I learned everything about English antiques from him,\" she says.\nBenjamin Sonnenberg's living room in his famous Gramercy Park house.\nBenjamin Sonnenberg (1901\u20131978) was a publicist who transformed press agentry, a knowledgeable collector and an admirer of the arts. He immigrated to the United States from Brest Litovsk, Russia, as a child and, as an adult, vowed to \"become a cross between Cond\u00E9 Nast and Otto Kahn.\" As befitting a man thought of as one of the last Edwardians, he resided in what was one of the last great private houses in Manhattan, a mansion overlooking Gramercy Park; the renowned Dorothy Draper decorated it to reflect his Anglophilia. It was there that Sonnenberg threw legendary parties with a carefully orchestrated social mix."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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