The Greek island of Patmos is a place of wonders both natural and divine. The island has drawn solace seekers for nearly 2,000 years - without ever loosing its cool. Patmos doesn’t have an airport. So you take a seven - hour ferry from Athens of fly to a neighboring isle and then catch a catamaran.

ON ASPRONISI, A ROCK ISLAND NEAR PATMOS. VPL BATHING SUIT WITH ATTACHED PARACHUTE, SHOWPIECE ONLY. FOR SIMILAR STYLES, GO TO VPLNYC.COM. FASHION EDITOR: ANNE CHRISTENSEN

A town - Chora on the island was named by UNESCO as World Heritage Site. The monastery, a fortress rising above whitewashed Chora, dominates the island physically and psychologically. Patmos’s 3000 inhabitants feel they live on blessed ground.

WHITE OUT IN CHORA. TOMMY HILFIGER DRESS, $498. GO TO TOMMY.COM.

The photo session was taken at Agriolivado beach, where Kyria Eleni rents out sun loungers, swam in an ample black bathing suit, pearls and gold cross that bobbed in her cleavage.

GRECIAN FORMULA IN CHORA. DIANE VON FURSTENBERG BATHING SUIT, $230. GO TO DVF.COM. TIFFANY & COMPANY BRACELET.

ON ASPRONISI. MICHAEL KORS BIKINI, $270. GO TO SAKSFIFTHAVENUE.COM. IN CHORA. MAX AZRIA BLACK BATHING SUIT, $260. GO TO MAXAZRIA.COM. CARTIER RING AND CUFF.

ON ASPRONISI. HERVÉ LÉGER BY MAX AZRIA GRAY BIKINI, $750. GO TO HERVELEGER.COM. FASHION ASSISTANT: COURTNEY A. WEINBLATT. HAIR BY WARD FOR LIVINGPROOF. MAKEUP BY ROMY SOLEIMANI AT MANAGEMENT ARTISTS FOR NARS COSMETICS. LOCATION SCOUT: EMANUELE MASCIONI. MODEL: TIIU KUIK.

SWIM GODDESS IN THE TOWN OF CHORA, A UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE SITE ON PATMOS. ERES BIKINI TOP, $215, AND BOTTOM, $380. GO TO ERES.FR. CAROLEE BRACELET.

Photographs by Camilla Akrans

Along the coastline of Hawaii’s Big Island, an architect and his family exchange the fast city life for different kind of flow. Outside, the white haze rising from the horizon gives way to a deep blue mass of land. Hawaii is the island that comprises the largest mountain on earth, most of it under the sea. A muggy breeze flutters through the long open -air walkway, painted an unfashionable brown and lined with weathered olive-green.

Even the Big Island has not completely avoided the pitfalls of the modern world, adding 35,000 residents in the last 15 years and, accordingly, strip malls that could be Anywhere, USA. Architect Craig Steely, his wife Cathy Liu, a painter, and their two-year-old son Zane are three of those new residents, having first come to the island six years ago, and now splitting their time between a home base in San Francisco and what one could call a remote-access network here.

If you turn off the main route, and with the sun casting an orange glaze from low in the sky, on cue the surroundings transform from vaguely tropical to dense jungle. The road narrows to one lane, and oncoming cars veer onto the red dirt shoulder to pass. Under windswept palms a haphazard labyrinth of tents and blue tarps has taken root; a lone rooster patrols the gravel parking lot.

The house is impossible not to notice, thanks in part to its siting on a lava flow. The Big Island is the youngest island in Hawaii’s chain, and is in a constant process of expansion and regeneration. The flow here in Kehena occurred in 1955, after a vent from the Kilauea volcano unleashed a slow coastal-bound pour of molten lava. In the same era, lava flowing from other vents covered a famed six-mile-long black-sand beach; more recently, during the 1990s, a flow destroyed the main road linking this side of the island with the Kona side.

The concrete floor takes on a silky appearance in the kitchen and dining areas. The Gideå table is from IKEA, the Karim Rashid Oh chairs are from Umbra, and the Erik Magnussen kerosene Ship’s lamp is by Stelton.

Eddy Uritani (or Uncle Eddy, as he’s known to Zane) did all the tile work in the kitchen and bathroom. The tiles come from a Canadian company called Interstyle.

The screen around the lanai is made from extrene, a material used by the military for radio towers. The welded-steel sculpture, set atop a pile of a’a rocks, was made by Craig.

A vintage suspended wall unit serves as a home office. Cathy demonstrates the “third bedroom”—a three-person hammock from Oaxaca.

When Cathy and Craig bought the land, it was completely bare. With plenty of sun and rain, these palms have grown a lot in the last two years.

The lava rock used for the steps was cut on a giant saw near Hilo. Craig finished assembling the staircase just in time for Zane’s one-year baby luau.

Botanist Patrick Blanc has been bringing the wilds of the rain forests to Parisian walls for over 30 years, most recently at the Jean Nouvel–designed Quai Branly museum. One lucky family, however, doesn’t have to go any farther than their living room to take in the wonders of Blanc’s vertical gardens. Oh how jealous Henri Rousseau would be!

Patrick Blanc is a radiant evergreen, bedecked in Peter Pantone snakeskin shoes, khaki safari trousers, and a lime disco shirt, with mescalin highlights in his blond hair. Even his vice is green: He smokes menthols.

The creator of the “plant wall,” a living canvas for indoor and outdoor vertical space, is in high demand. His trademark technique for a top-down, no-fuss, no-muss irrigation system, not to mention the 30 years of botanical research on three continents under his belt, have made him an urban garden guru. Recent creations include the hip Pershing Hall hotel and the Fondation Cartier in Paris, the swanky Siam Paragon mall in Bangkok, boutiques in New York and Paris, and restaurants in Los Angeles and beyond.

Though he always kept a flat in Paris to be close to the communications agency he runs, his wife, Vivette, and their children moved from outside Rambouillet, 
an hour’s drive from the city, where they had renovated a longère, an ancient, low-lying elongated house nestled into a garden. “Basically, when we moved our house shifted 90 degrees, and so did the garden,” Dimanche says. “This house, for us, has meant a whole new life, a new lifestyle,” adds Vivette. “It’s not a purely conceptual house. It’s all about le vivant, le vécu,” she explains, the living, the lived experience.

For all its urban delights, Paris is one of the densest world capitals—two million residents packed into only 40 square miles—and it just cries out for a green manifesto. Blanc’s plant walls may be part of that, producing spaces that don’t deny the urban grid but weave it into the realm of the living. From homes and museums Blanc now wants to move on to the city’s least attractive spots—parking lots, public housing, train stations, “all those places where we don’t expect living things.” “The plant wall is not a criticism of the city,” he adds. “I’m only trying to reconcile it with nature.”

Due to recent move-outs and downsizing of government offices, Kanchogaidori, the central avenue of the city which literally means “government office street,” has noticeably become desolate despite its name.  In an effort to revive the street, Towada City has begun the Arts Towada Project, for the improvement of the cityscape and future town planning in Japan.

In this project, an outdoor space, namely Kanchogaidori, is transformed into a museum, with a variety of artworks all along the street.  Such a project is very unique and rare, even when considered on a global scale.  Furthermore, with the harmony of the artworks and Towada’s beautiful nature and rich history, as well as the local vitality, Towada aims to be recognized as “City of Arts” and “City of Inspiration and Creation.”

The Arts Towada Project is planned to be completed in the spring of 2010; events leading up to the completion includes: the 2008 opening of the Towada Art Center, the central facility for the project; renovation of the former tax office site; and installation of the artwork symbolizing the project.

Arts Towada is a project to place various works of art in the Towada Art Center and Kanchogaidori over a period of 5 years. The concept behind the project is the “symbiosis of the city, nature, and art” and “experiences through art.” In the Towada Art Center, there are 22 artworks by 21 artists in and outside Japan, inspired by the dialogue with the local cityscape, nature, and people.

Each artwork was created exclusively for the Art Center, and the design of the building was catered to the works; thus, there is an unmatched intimacy between the building and the artworks. You will find art throughout the facility, not only in exhibition rooms; the Art Center is full of surprise for a new art experience.

If you are a forest person, it’s gonna be hard to believe in better office environment than the one that architectural firm, Selgas Cano, recently built to work out of, in Madrid.

It’s really simple tube, sunken into the ground, with a long window on one side. The architecture is very good and a little goes a long way: Sinking the building into the ground is an ancient strategy to improve building insulation; Inside, the recessed floors make it seem as if you’re completely immersed in the woods, when you’re looking up.

The Dutch photographer Iwan Baan took wonderful pictures of the structure. Take a close look ….!

A man of few words, Zappon is a prolific cinematographer of critically lauded Danish films such as Okay and Aftermath, known for their graceful asceticism and the showcasing of actress Paprika Steen, the Cate Blanchett of Copenhagen. The main living space of the house is constructed of immense I-profiles, allowing for a full wall of glass with four large sliding doors that open to the backyard.

Chalkboard-fronted cabinets provide an ideal surface for scrawling shopping lists. In the open kitchen, tall cupboards are coated with black matte paint that can be used as a chalkboard, a clever and practical use of the surface space. The color matches the exterior of the house, although no one has yet to use the front door as a chalkboard, even with the constant presence of the children and their friends.

In keeping with the house’s spirit, its master bath calls for a sense of adventure. Like the forest and beach that surround it, the house has diverse textures. There are contrasts all over the house in light and dark, warm and cold, hard and soft—and it changes all the time.

The expansive, industrial nature of the living room contrasts with the refined design of the bedroom wing, which is covered entirely with ash wood on the floor, walls, and ceiling. In the bedroom wing, sunlight shines down from the Plexiglass bubbles. Steel in the cutaways reflects the light.

The minimalist bathroom is naturally lit with the same type of skylight that brightens the bedroom wing.

In the front yard, landscape architect Torben Schönherr created a huge circular stone fireplace, excavating it right out of the site. Essentially a large fire pit that would make any budding pyromaniac giddy, the inclusive design allows for the family to gather after a swim or shower and perhaps sing a campfire song. Or not.

Bil Ehrlich, a young Harvard-trained architect, bought and gutted a derelict five-floor Manhattan town house and created, behind its old cast-iron facade, a huge white alterna-house. But it seems downright laughable today that the house might have once been seen to be cold and impersonal. Minimal, yes. Yet compared with the checklist of modernist decorating and art collecting tropes so in vogue nowadays, Ehrlich’s house is as personal as it gets.

And when you walk into the huge volume of the main living area, there’s no question that he’s done just that. It’s a space worthy of a Chelsea gallery: one great white wall stretches 65 feet from the front of the building to the back and 35 feet up to a skylight.

A quasi-mezzanine — containing a dining area and a kitchen — overlooks the living room. Here, too, the art takes center stage: a Joel Otterson sculpture/shower stands in the middle of the master bedroom. But then again, the entire upstairs structure — mezzanine and all — is like one enormous sculpture, its rooms jutting out into the main space’s huge rectangle, turned at a 30-degree angle, in a reference to the nearby Flatiron Building.

Ehrlich’s quirky design and choice of location reflected his rejection of the prevailing urban landscape and enabled him to reconcile the worlds of architecture, art and design, which back then mixed — in social terms at least — about as well as oil paint and water.

‘‘It was a more rigid caste system,’’ says Ehrlich, who is a co-founder of Artes Magnus, a company that issues limited-edition objects like Cindy Sherman’s Madame de Pompadour-inspired china. ‘‘You had artists getting involved in loft living and alternative spaces,’’ he remembered. ‘‘On the other hand, if you were in the more professional, conventional trajectory, you lived somewhere like the Upper East Side. I had close friends from both camps, and I didn’t want to make a statement that I was with either, so I chose a part of the city that was very anonymous. There was no Flatiron district then — this was no-man’s-land.’’

But has always bought what he likes. For him, art is more like a record of where you’ve been and what you’ve thought. ‘‘I’m not into the hero worshiping and the craziness that goes on,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m collecting my experiences.’’

Few destinations have benefited from modern tourism quite like Bali, Indonesia. It makes them so sad: hundreds if not thousands of years of cultural evolution undone by a few decades of modern, Western-style development, much of it of the globalized luxury persuasion.

Yes, of course, Bali was a different place before it had a Four Seasons, a Hard Rock Hotel, two million tourists a year, terrorist bombings and so on. And, of course, at some level I — like all travelers — want every quaint corner of the world to remain untouched. Yet whom does that serve? Certainly not the people of the world’s great untouched places.

Tourism levels in Bali have now exceeded pre-2002 levels (before the first terrorist bombings) and were up 20 percent last year. Did the prince feel that Bali’s culture was in danger of being overrun?

Tourism is one of the most important things in Bali. People there thank to God when they look at themselves in the mirror. How did they get such an interesting place? God bless them! It’s life! There’s change in a positive way, or negative way. So far, I think Bali has the positive way. Bali could adapt and innovate. I believe Bali always picks the good things that suit Bali.

There’s no such a place, where religion plays a greater (or prettier) role in daily life — visually, culturally and, yes, spiritually, even to an outsider. Virtually every corner and tree branch of Ubud is adorned daily with offerings of incense and banana-leaf parcels with rice and yellow ginger shavings, set out for a dazzling array of gods.

Ceremonies are held in public and private for full moons, new moons, days akin to Friday the 13th, for different aspects of daily, social and everyday life. Neighbors, kitchens, animals, trees, waters and motorbikes all have their day, commanding more offerings, parades, banners, incense.

Of course, Ubud is also the kind of place where every satay stand fronts a spa or ‘‘wellness center.’’ Which means that here you sometimes get spiritual jibber-jabber.

Despite the presence of some of the world’s most luxurious resorts, and all the internationally familiar creature comforts they enshrine, Bali can still be a deeply weird, exotic place to visit. It’s a society where 17-year-olds file down their canines to ‘‘get rid of the animal spirit,’’ where pickpockets discovered in the marketplace can be beaten by the crowd, where adulterers are still rumored to be occasionally stoned.

And of Mozaic Restaurant, an absolutely trumped-up Wine Spectator/Grandes Tables du Monde affair where tabs can run up to $100 or more that served food far less interesting and tasty than the $1.50 plates of nasi campur at the local restaurants called warungs.

Borneo is the third largest island in the world. It is located at the centre of Maritime Southeast Asia. Administratively, this island is divided between Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei. The island is a haven for researchers, scientists and adventure travelers and one of the most biologically diverse places in the world.

Borneo is surrounded by the South China Sea to the north and northwest, the Sulu Sea to the northeast, the Celebes Sea and the Makassar Strait to the east, and the Java Sea and Karimata Strait to the south. To the west of Borneo are the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra. To the south is Java. To the east is the island of Sulawesi (Celebes). To the northeast is the Philippines.

Borneo is very rich in biodiversity compared to many other areas (MacKinnon et al. 1998). There are about 15,000 species of flowering plants with 3,000 species of trees (267 species are dipterocarps), 221 species of terrestrial mammals and 420 species of resident birds in Borneo. With her young nearby, a female orangutan eats durian fruits in the Danum Valley, which has the highest concentration of the endangered species on the island. Orangutan is a Malay word that translates to “man of the forest.”

A mangrove pit viper in Bako National Park in Sarawak. The park is popular for its walking trails and abundant wildlife that includes bearded pigs and proboscis monkeys.

Jutting out into the South China Sea, the Santubong Peninsula is known for its beaches, jungle treks and Irrawaddy dolphin sightings.

Proboscis monkeys in Sabah in northeastern Borneo. The species, endemic to the island, lives most of its life in the treetops.

From left, a silvered leaf monkey, a little spider hunter bird on a wild banana flower and a leaf-nosed lizard.

A rising demand for palm oil has resulted in the clearing of huge tracts of rain forest in Borneo, putting wildlife habitats at risk. Left, access roads and terraced fields in Sarawak.

A mixed swamp forest near Baku National Park.

A long-tailed macaque with her young in Danum Valley. This species inhabits forests located near rivers.

Ginkgo Lounge is located in Portimão, Portugal and it’s a very stylish and sunny Restaurant & Lounge. The place is a perfect spot for travelers and locals. The design of the building is very simple, but at the same time spectacular.

Ginko Lounge offers amazing green atmosphere inside and out. The restaurant is surrounded by greenery and makes sense of an eco house. Portimao is a city, where the sun is shining almost every day. The city is also known as Vila Nova de Portimão.

In 1924 it was incorporated as a city and became known as Portimão. The city proper has 45,000 inhabitants and the entire municipality 52,000.

Portimão is also a city with great sporting events. It is here, that in the summer, the Mundialito de Futebol de Praia of Beach Football. Even the Rally Lisbon-Dakar goes through this city, where you can also see Surf and Kitesurf.

Photographs by Tiago Rosado