You can change the entire look of a landscape or mood of an entertaining space through outdoor lighting. Frisella Outdoor Lighting has been lighting St. Louis area homes since 2006 with their combination of thoughtful design, friendly, personal service and quality lighting products on the market.

Nettie White’s stock in trade is transformation: designing high-end, custom artistic spaces that breath new life into just about everything in your home.

“My specialty is color. I started out doing walls and had to be creative with what was there,” she says, “and that turned into ‘What about our cabinets?’ and ‘What about the bookcase, and what about floors?’ We do everything.”

When Rich and Terri LoRusso opened LoRusso’s Cucina almost three decades ago, many of the recipes came straight from his mother’s kitchen. “This restaurant emulates how I was brought up,” he says.

Nothing unusual in that, except the matriarch of this Italian restaurant was Irish.“My grandmother taught my mom to cook,” LoRusso explains. He, in turn, always loved to hang out in the kitchen, soaking up knowledge from his mother and his paternal aunts.

“Downtown has always been my playground,” laughs homeowner Joe Benninger. “I love the pace, the bars and the people.” So when Joe and his girlfriend Kelly Lindsay began looking for a new place to call home, there was no question it would be in the city.

It’s often said that St. Louis is, in many ways, still a “small town.” Live here long enough and you’re bound to run into someone you know almost anywhere you go. For Kathy Cramer and John Davis, the fifth owners of this elegant three-story in Ladue, the colloquialism certainly seemed to hold true. 

Melissa Losos, and anyone who has viewed her garden and knows the story behind it, would agree. That the 2015 St. Louis Homes & Lifestyles' Garden of the Year is genius, there is no doubt. Twice on the Missouri Botanical Garden tour of private gardens, which occurs once every three years, the breathtaking, serene, one-acre parklike space resembles something one would encounter on a tour of the Orient rather than in a back yard in Central St. Louis County.