Furniture

The house is nestled on a quiet street on the east side of Moorestown, the same neighborhood Randall Cunningham once called home. With its weathered shingles and simple contours, it might fit perfectly into the landscape of the New England seashore. Step inside, and New England disappears; it's suddenly Europe on a grand scale. Stately tradition reigns from the grand hall through the first floor of this 5,300-square-foot home that was lovingly built in 1990 by Pasquale "Pat" Procacci and his wife, Mary, and has been constantly refined since then.

  Freeman's three-day summer estate auction next week of jewelry and watches, paintings, prints and sculpture, and furniture and decorative arts is a catalog event, but there is just one catalog for all three days and most of its nearly 1,400 lots are expected to bring three figures. In other words, it's a good little sale to get out of the way before heading to the Shore for the weekend. The jewelry and watches will be offered at the first session, beginning at 11 a.m. Wednesday at the gallery at 1808 Chestnut St. They come from a variety of estates, including the Yannopoulos estate of Philadelphia.

Besides their obvious aesthetic appeal, exhibitions of historical decorative arts serve as explorations in cultural anthropology. They reveal how our forebears solved practical problems of daily living, as well as their material values and tastes. This was revealed to stunning effect 12 years ago at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in a show called "Worldly Goods," which displayed for our delectation a wide variety of furniture, silver, and other domestic accessories made and used in Pennsylvania from its founding to the middle of the 18th century.

"What sports rights haven't gone up?" - Comcast Corp. CEO Brian Roberts, after agreeing to pay about $4.4 billion to broadcast the Olympic Games of 2014 through 2020 on NBC "We think it's really important that the investors understand that we have a plan. The plan isn't just 'survival.' " - Ford Co. chief financial officer Lewis Booth "They can afford to take a long-term view of the market. They don't want countries to turn to alternative fuels. They don't want people on buses.

"I need some serious advice," my new friend Sheila wrote in an e-mail. "I have all this furniture from my old house, plus a mishmash of art and stuff, and minimal space. I don't know what to do with it all. " As a decorating addict, I was already itching to help, but here's what sealed it: "I would like to get some sense of being settled here because it would help me not feel so lost," her e-mail said. "If my little space here felt together, then I think I could handle the rest of my disconnected life.

  The twin catalogs for next weekend's sale of modern and contemporary arts and crafts at the Rago Arts and Auction Center present a history of the movements and creators of the last 110 years, from the well-established to the up-and-coming. Just as remarkable is the sale itself. The more than 1,300 lots of furniture, ceramics, glass, metalwork, and decorative art for sale at the two-day event in Lambertville include works by many of the best-known names in an abundance seldom seen.

Cara Carroccia and Michael Bach share a diminutive Philadelphia home that proves that less can, indeed, look like more. The couple's 862-square-foot, three-story house on Camac Street, built in 1829, is only 15 feet wide and 27 feet deep, a tiny footprint. But the two-bedroom dwelling and its garden live large, offering generous space for the couple and their two daughters. There's even enough space for an office for Carroccia, an architect. She says she likes to joke about the house with visitors.

This couch potato is getting a new couch, and it's harder than you think. I've chosen the wrong couch before, in my life. In fact, my couch mistakes rival my marital mistakes, though my couches have lasted longer than my marriages. I'm not only unlucky in love, I'm unlucky in lounge. We begin back in the Dark Ages. In other words, my marriage to Thing Two. When one of us had the great idea that not everything in the family room needed to match, we acquired a red-plaid couch, a floral chair, and a green-patterned chair-and-a-half.

  Two area auction houses that regularly offer appraisals on Antiques Roadshow - Noel Barrett, known for toys, and Freeman's, known for fine furniture and decorative arts - will have major sales in the next few days. Barrett's sale, "Something for Everyone," beginning at 10 a.m. Saturday at the Eagle Fire Hall in New Hope, will offer more than 700 lots of holiday items, antique games, clockwork toys, and salesmen's samples. The sale is also being carried online at www.liveauctioneers.com . One of the earliest lots - and a top piece in the auction - is an early-20th-century clockwork Halloween Vegetable Man improbably made of papier-mache.

When Joanne and George Baltaeff were getting married three years ago, they decided that celebrating their new life together called for moving out of old homes and making a new one. The house-hunting began one snowy afternoon, when Joanne made arrangements with a Realtor to see six properties for sale. It ended about 20 minutes later, when she fell in love with the first one, a three-bedroom/three-bath house on a quiet street in Springfield, Delaware County. "I was working a lot, and she was saying we should find a house," George says.