But rescue has come to the most glorious of them all, the freshly restored St. Pancras, a red sandstone and limestone palace in the dull gray smear of North London.

Indeed, this whole project is elegant and eloquent testament to the synthesis of old and new: the house of 21st-century technology set within an early-20th-century limestone palace.

The building was designed by Carrere & Hastings, a severe limestone palace with fantastically vermiculated ground-floor stone work and a discreet invisible sign.

As an immense limestone palace comes into view, Despont, architect and raconteur extraordinaire, turns to me and says, "Once you arrive here you step into your own world."

"I like to think I have reinvented the Palm Beach house," announces Despont, as we walk through the double entrance doors to Sidney Kimmel's limestone palace.

Frick's architects, Carrere & Hastings, drew upon 18th-century French sources when they designed his three-story limestone palace, which cost $5 million.

As many as 3,000 stunning limestone palaces, temples and other structures have been excavated there since archaeologists ventured to the site in the 19th century.

Anyway, in Himself and myself go to the limestone palace on Fifth Avenue and up to the second floor to look at the accessories.

But a paper-thin layer of Baku society is housing itself in limestone palaces built high above the sea.

The exterior is a gothic-style limestone palace that borrows heavily from the detail of the great medieval chateaux of France's Loire Valley.