When one group of thugs arrived at a Muslim-owned movie theater housed in a sprawling villa, they hurled rocks over the gate, smashing windows.

When visitors ascend the winding road that leads to Franjo Tudjman's sprawling presidential villa, they are greeted by guards who could have stepped out of a Viennese opera.

The school is sited around a main building called Westwick Lodge, "a sprawling Victorian villa with the modern dormitories and classroom block hidden at the rear.

In the quiet immaculate gardens of Coral Gables, countless lamps illuminated the handsome sprawling villas with their red-tiled roofs, and swimming pools shimmering with turquoise light.

The sprawling villa appeared completely isolated, and at first glance it seemed deserted, too.

The sprawling villa had been built, at exorbitant cost, by Hongkong and Shanghai Banking, one of this city's oldest and richest institutions, as the official residence of its chairman.

On Monday, the sprawling, two-story villa was reopened as a museum.

This setting is the Newington-Cropsey Foundation Gallery of Art and Cultural Studies Center, which opened on adjacent property in 1994 in a sprawling yellow-and-white Palladian-style villa.

Leaders from Sierra Leone to Congo to Angola have plundered Africa's riches, stashing the money away in Switzerland and erecting sprawling gated villas, where they live guarded by armed men.

Squat, sprawling villas fit for Roman nobility, thick-set square towers bristling with driftwood cannon and shell-shields.