Ali Tayar

"I design the hell out of ceilings," says Ali Tayar, a New York architect known for his ingenious commercial and residential interiors. When Tayar turned the ground-floor of a run-down Manhattan building into the restaurant Pop, he says, "I wanted to define an envelope but also let people see beyond it." He developed a system of ceiling panels, designed like a kit of parts around specific functions — lighting, heating, air conditioning and amplifying — with openings that offered glimpses of the original ceiling above. At the Omnia, a hotel near the Matterhorn in Switzerland, he took the concept further. Tayar made the dropped ceiling — usually a synonym for tacky — a rich architectural tapestry, with pin-spots peeking through precisely cut oak-veneered panels (left). Tayar grew up in Istanbul, surrounded by Byzantine and Ottoman buildings, in which no ceiling was left un-ornamented. Perhaps that's why, though he's every bit the modernist, Tayar has always considered ceilings a key part of the architect's domain.

Roman & Williams

When Andre Balazs chose the New York firm Roman & Williams to design the Standard in Manhattan (part of his chain of hip, budget hotels) he was ensuring that even the ceilings would be special. In a hotel, says Robin Standefer (who runs the firm with husband Stephen Alesch), "You're in bed a lot. And you do a lot of ceiling-gazing." The couple persuaded Balazs to let them use wood instead of sheetrock for the ceilings, which she says will make the rooms feel "warm and womblike." It will also help, she says, when it comes to camouflaging inevitable intrusions, like vents. Standefer says she is a "ceiling obsessive." Designing a California house for the actress Kate Hudson, she created a dining room ceiling of copper foil that "reflects the chandelier and the candles on the table in the most gorgeous way — it's like a melted penny on the ceiling." A Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles (right) will feel like the inside of a tansu cabinet, with every surface, including the ceilings, carefully crafted of wood. And in some future project, she says, she may use video projection to create what looks like a seventeenth century ceiling — "because no one can afford to do a real one."

Hugh Newell Jacobsen

Hugh Newell Jacobsen has been practicing architecture in Washington, D.C. for 50 years, and he has never forsaken ceilings. "When you do a high-rise building, really any building over two stories," he observes, "the ceilings at night are basically the facade people see from the street. To puncture it all with holes, access panels, downlights or a dropped ceiling that belongs in a supermarket cheapens the entire building." Most of Jacobsen's buildings aren't high-rises, but single-story houses and museums that, while modernist, are classical in their proportions. Ceilings are practically inviolate. Miniature pin-spots are barely noticeable. And forget about vents. "In my buildings, you never can find where the air enters or where it leaves," Jacobsen brags. (He forces air through slits so long and narrow, they "read" as lines rather than openings.) When sprinklers, smoke detectors and the like can't be avoided, he says, "I like to create some order — lining things up with the centers of doors or windows." After all, says Jacobsen, "Architecture without order isn't architecture."