Lucio Fontana Takashi Murakami Maurizio Cattelan Bernard Frize Paola Pivi Ugo Rondinone Dasha, Gaga, and Gago Party for MOCA Shaq's Big Debut

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For collector Adriana Abascal, trophy hunting holds no appeal. What matters to her is the charge an artwork carries. "In art I’m not content to be entertained or distracted," she says. "I want to laugh hard or cry until I have no more tears. I can be shocked or provoked and actually like it. I never feel fear, because I adore what I buy. Certain artists excite me and draw me into the future."

The words stream out, in lightly accented English, from a woman of extraordinary beauty and easy assurance with an underlying streak of intensity. The 39-year-old Abascal, an author and model who was crowned Miss Mexico in 1988, is now the face of Suárez, the famous Spanish jeweler. During the past four years, she has also become an avid supporter of international contemporary artists.

She married, in 2001, the Spanish businessman Juan Villalonga, with whom she has three young children. The family divides its time between Bel Air, California, where they spend vacations in the mansion in which Candice Bergen grew up, and West London. There they reside in two adjacent 19th- century town houses that a previous owner combined into a single dwelling with a simple white stucco façade, gutting the interior and fitting the larger spaces with period furnishings, hand-painted wall coverings and swagged drapes. The Villalongas loved the place but felt uncomfortable with the theatrical decor. They wanted bright, child-friendly spaces, rather than a grand stage for entertaining, and they needed a suitable background for the new art they had begun to acquire.

To achieve something lighter, the family brought in the well-known Los Angeles-based designers Carole Katleman, whose clients have included members of the entertainment community, and Daniel Cuevas. Having also worked on the Bel Air house, the designers have forged a relationship with the Villalongas over the past decade and have an intuitive understanding of their preferences and needs. "They are so easy to work for," says Katleman. "They give us complete freedom. It’s a joyous experience based on a shared love of beautiful things."

The ornamentation and drapes were removed, and the two-story dining room became a family room that leads to a terraced garden in the rear. "We wanted to give the architecture room to breathe — it had been smothered before," says Cuevas. He notes that "coming from southern California, we found the London light to be rather gloomy, as did the Villalongas, and we wanted to enhance it wherever we could."

For furnishings, the designers hunted down an eclectic mix of mid-20th-century and contemporary pieces in London and L.A. If they couldn’t find exactly the items they were looking for, Cuevas would design and make them, producing several unique sofas and tables, along with a luxurious daybed.

A black-and-white palette unifies the flowing spaces of the house’s five levels. Floors and mahogany paneling have been stained ebony to complement white walls, ceilings and Ionic columns. The expanses of white enlarge the well-proportioned rooms, diffusing the light from the tall windows and perfectly setting off both the monochromatic and the more colorful paintings, photographs and sculpture on view.

The quiet sophistication of the decor matches that of the art. "We buy what we want without thinking about whether we have a place for it," says Abascal, whose taste is rooted in a childhood love of painting plus a course in art history at Christie’s. "But sometimes it works the other way. You look at a space, and you think how a particular artist would transform it." For her, Takashi Murakami is such transformative talent. Abascal installed the Japanese artist’s 2002 wall sculpture Kumo-Kun ("Mr. Cloud"), a white fiberglass and wood cloud-shaped face with an open smiling mouth, above the door to the drawing room, where it serves as a focal point.

A yellow canvas from 1998 marked with a Z by Maurizio Cattelan — his irreverent play on Lucio Fontana’s famous slashed canvases of the 1960s — is another of her favorites. Abascal acquired it from the Paris-based dealer Emmanuel Perrotin, with whom she has been working regularly for the past few years. Perrotin introduced her to the work of Bhakti Baxter, a young Miami-based artist. One of his luminous sculptural compositions with white foam globes, An Intelligible Sphere Whose Center Is Everywhere and Circumference Is Nowhere, 2005, hangs in the expansive family room. The Baxter, Abascal says, is dynamic yet tightly controlled, and she longs to juxtapose it with a piece expressing an entirely different sensibility — "something that’s messy, even nightmarish." On an adjacent wall, is a large 2006 photograph by the Italian artist Paola Pivi of an alligator emerging from a pile of whipped cream.