Mr. Christenberry didn't grow up around the graceful antebellum mansions and elegant public buildings that reflect the gentility of the South, and they are not represented in his work.

A one-third-mile-long terrace laced with graceful mansions and town houses, the promenade is, on most days, a perch from which to contemplate the city.

At the height of the cold war, a graceful, Italian-designed mansion at a desirable address seemed to be the perfect place for the American Embassy in a drab and gray city.

The Queen Anne Inn (2147 Tremont Place; 303-296-6666) is an elegant bed and breakfast inn with 10 guest rooms with private baths, in a graceful mansion, near the State Capitol.

We stayed at Geneva on the Lake Resort, a graceful mansion built in 1910 and modeled after an Italian Renaissance villa in Frascati.

Despite the heat, we were ecstatic to be in Shanghai, spending our first night in the city wandering around the French Concession, with its low, graceful mansions and streets canopied with leafy trees.

Inside the graceful, high-ceilinged mansion, everything was basically intact, though rotten apples sat in a bowl, and mosquito larvae swarmed in stagnant water at the bottom of several flower vases.

The result was The Mount, finished in 1902, a graceful white mansion on top of a hill, overlooking a wild sweep of meadow and woods against which Wharton would plant formal, terraced gardens.

The 20-story apartment building that has housed Russian diplomats since 1974 juts into the sky, an odd giant among quaint homes, low-rise co-ops and graceful mansions.

Its past wealth, based on carpet and silk production, accounts for the graceful 18th-century mansions lining the Rua 19 de Junho.