A chandelier made of Bijan perfume bottles. Click a photo to see many more images.Hundreds of flowerpots lined the property, their contents changing with the seasons. Click a photo to see many more images.The Beverly Hills home that was an incubator for the so-called "most expensive store in the world" recently sold for $9.8 million, about $2 million under its asking price, according to the Los Angeles Times. Click here or on a photo to see a slideshow of the home.

Bijan Pakzad -- or simply Bijan, as he preferred to be called -- owned the eponymous by-appointment-only Rodeo Drive boutique where President Obama, both Bushes and Clinton bought suits. His devil-may-care luxury aesthetic was so distinctively over the top that when he died in 2011, the New York Times' T Magazine declared: "The '80s are officially over."

He poured a great deal of care into his home, which the Bijan boutique website cites as the wellspring of much of his "best creative expression and inspiration." Neighbors and passersby recognized the mansion at 100 Copley Place by the hundreds of flowerpots lining the property; the pots' contents changed with the seasons. The grounds also contained orange trees, bougainvillea,

The controversial treehouse on Anna Maria Island in Florida. Click a photo to go to a slideshow. (Photos via the owners' website, CoolTreeHouse.com)Click a photo to go to a slideshow. (Via CoolTreeHouse.com)"The story below could happen to you or anybody."

That's how Lynn Tran starts the tale of her oceanfront treehouse, a "childhood dream" that has soured into a "headache, heartache." She and her husband, Richard Hazen, have been told that if they don't dismantle the treehouse, they're going to have to pay fines of $500 a day.

She and Hazen built the treehouse -- "really just a dressed-up, glorified two-story deck," reports Fox 13 of Tampa Bay -- on their property on Anna Maria Island in Florida, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. They spent about $20,000 on it and, they say, had Holmes Beach's permission. (Click here or on a photo to go to a slideshow of the treehouse.)

But they didn't get it in writing.

According to the account on the couple's website, CoolTreeHouse.com, Hazen did go to the city building department in 2011 seeking a permit, but the building official there -- after consulting colleagues in front of Hazen -- told him a permit wasn't necessary. So they went ahead and built.

That

Gallup polled America's 50 biggest metro areas, asking residents whether they feel safe walking at night. Click the photo to go to a slideshow of the securest-feeling areas. (Photo credit: Thinkstock)

Do you feel safe walking alone at night?

That's what Gallup recently asked people who live in America's 50 biggest metro areas.

Perhaps surprisingly, residents of the biggest metro areas feel scarcely less secure than the national average: 71 percent of big-city residents and their suburban neighbors, vs. 72 percent for the nation as a whole.

The variation was wide -- a 25-percentage-point difference -- between the least and most secure-feeling city dwellers.

Certainly there's a strong correlation between the FBI violent crime rate and how residents actually feel, Gallup says. In the Memphis area, the smallest proportion of residents feel safe walking alone at night out of the 50 big metro areas surveyed -- and indeed, Memphis is one of the most dangerous cities in America, according to a report published on Yahoo! Homes last year.

Yet residents of some of the most notoriously dangerous metro areas, like Detroit and St. Louis, aren't especially nervous about walking alone at night. In fact,

Click on a photo to go to a slideshow. (Photo credit: Target)"Dollhouse" blueprints. Click the photo to go to a slideshow. (Photo credit: Target)This week, Target built a life-size Cape Cod-style dollhouse smack in the middle of Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal -- furnished not with toy furniture but with more than 3,000 items showcasing its real-life Threshold collection. About 40,000 people stopped by, free to wander around inside and even shop for items in the house from their mobile devices.

[Click here or on a photo to go to a slideshow.]

I love this whimsical idea of playing with scale, essentially turning visitors into props themselves: dolls. At least that's how they look to me in the pictures, wandering through the 1,500-square-foot, seven-room "house." It reminds me a little of those tilt-shift photos that make the normal-size world look miniature.

People who are more practical-minded might not quite see the appeal. Isn't a life-size dollhouse just, you know, a house?

What sets this apart, though, are some optical illusions and glaring omissions. The most prominent omission, of course, is the fourth wall. The faux

$1,200 a month in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Click the photo to go to a slideshow.West Village in Manhattan, $1,900. Click the photo to go to a slideshow.A week ago, The Worst Room launched on Tumblr with these unassuming words: "This is a blog created for me to share the craigslist postings I sift through on a daily basis trying to find decent, affordable housing in New York City."

Now, it's pretty well known by now that New York is an expensive place to live -- in fact, the most expensive U.S. city. In Manhattan, the cost of living is double the national average.

But Ryan Nethery's New York housing blog is going viral (even across the pond) because it puts visuals to those statistics, showing just what kind of living space you can expect on a modest budget. For those who live outside the city, it's pretty shocking.

[Click here to see a slideshow of some of his most appalling discoveries.]

Nethery's circumstances are compelling in their own right. A 25-year-old freelance cinematographer from Kentucky (see his work on Vimeo), he has lived in the city for five years -- and he's currently homeless. He keeps his stuff in a car his grandmother

The most exciting city in America came out on top on four criteria: most diversity, and most museums, theater companies and movie theaters per square mile. Click the photo to go to a slideshow of category winners. (Photo credit: Flickr user damianpenney)Our fun-loving friends at Movoto Real Estate -- who have previously investigated such hard-hitting questions as how much the house from "The Simpsons" is worth and what price the Monopoly game's properties would fetch in real life -- recently set themselves the ambitious task of determining the most exciting cities in America.

Now, I'm not going to lie to you: Their results are going to be controversial, no doubt. New York City isn't in the top five, and Los Angeles isn't on the list at all. And some of the cities that do make the list, including their No. 1, are bound to raise eyebrows.

They describe their methodology in more depth over on Movoto Blog (where a robust conversation is already roiling in the comments), but in broad strokes, they rated the 50 biggest cities on these criteria:

• Park acreage per person.
• Percentage of the population age 20 to 34.
• Bars, movie theaters, museums, theater companies and music venues per square mile.
• Racial and ethnic diversity: "The smaller a city’s

The restored U.N. Security Council Chamber, photographed by architect, author and Archidose blogger John Hill.Data outlets replaced the ashtrays next to the microphones. (Photo by John Hill)Since 1952, one room in New York City has acted as the world's emergency room, the main place where leaders gather whenever world peace is threatened.

But the United Nations Security Council Chamber had been showing the effects of time. So in 2010, it closed temporarily. U.N. Security Council members made do with a replica while the real space underwent renovation.

On April 16, the chamber finally reopened. And what had changed in those three years?

Hardly a thing.

The recent renovation sought to ensure that the chamber "look exactly as it did in 1952," according to Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide at the April 16 rededication of the chamber, which was a gift from Norway. He referred to the chamber as "perhaps the most important room in the world."

The meticulous restoration is a testament to the success of the original architect, Arnstein Arneberg of Norway, who told Interiors magazine more than 60 years ago that his goal was "to execute a room of good, durable materials

Struggling homeowners aren't the only victims anymore.Own a home? Watch out, you could be the victim of a refinance or housing scam and not even know it.

Since the beginning of the Great Recession, con artists have been targeting struggling homeowners. Posing as government agencies, nonprofits and attorneys, these scammers prey on homeowners ready to do anything to save their homes from foreclosure.

But even as authorities catch on to the latest scams and shut them down, new ones evolve. Today, it's no longer just struggling homeowners who run the risk of falling victim to hustlers.

"Many people who have been scammed were being proactive," says Yolanda McGill, Senior Counsel for the Fair Housing and Fair Lending Project at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. In many cases she has seen, homeowners could see life changes ahead – such as retirement or company downsizing – and wanted to refinance and lower their payments in advance of these events.

"These people were doing just fine but thought it made sense to refinance and get a