The story takes place in a plush salon with huge tilted walls covered in crimson velvet.
"When I was young, I didn't have any toys," 23-year-old Sidiki says, sitting in the plush salon of the Diabaté house in the Malian capital of Bamako.
Much to my disappointment, Tom Cruise had booked the suite during my stay, so I had to make do with a junior suite, which featured such amenities as a steam shower, flat-screen TV, and plush salon furniture.
That house included, among other things, a plush red salon with an oil painting of Mr. Loti as an Ottoman warrior; a more traditionally French blue room with a carpet given to him by the Turkish government for his behind-the-scenes diplomacy after World War I; a Chinese room; a Turkish salon; an Arab room; and a Renaissance room with an asymmetrical stone staircase and chandeliers galore.
An elegant, bejewelled woman in a shimmering gown peers languorously out on to a crowded London thoroughfare, perhaps Regent Street or Piccadilly, from a plush, warmly lit salon, while a man faces away from the window with studied nonchalance, blowing smoke rings.
René Beyer, chief executive of the Zurich-based Beyer, one of the most prestigious Swiss watch retailers, said that he had no plans to step beyond the cream-colored confines of Palexpo, Geneva's main exhibition center, which was refitted with plush sofas for the salon — a clear departure from its normally drab and neon-lit environment.
The central room is a rustic, wood-paneled salon filled with plush Victorian furniture (some of it original) and the composer's ebony Steinway grand piano.
The rooms are comfortable, and guests have the use of a grand salon decorated with antiques and plush sofas.
The sets are mostly just bare walls, partitions and stairwells that slide into place to suggest everything from the humble bedroom of Antonia, the daughter of the fretful violin maker Crespel, to the spacious salon in Venice, where we meet the courtesan Giulietta, here the vocally plush and lovely mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts.
As Salon reported in 2000, Coffey was once the US attorney in southern Florida, a plush gig as a federal prosecutor where he focused on drug cases, immigration violations, and fraud in the healthcare system.
In Kunming, a long strip of Xibao Street is lined with "hairdressing salons" where employees dress in short, tight skirts and leopard-print tops, where plush couches outnumber barber's chairs.
