This issue's ''cover house'' resides in Bayonne, France. It is owned by an artist, designer and ''nose'' named Christian Astuguevieille, and it is filled with objects covered in rope, cloth and stuffing, and brilliantly hued paint. There is a wooden temple in its palatial air shaft and a room crammed mostly with porcelain. It is a gorgeous, sensual and layered interior ///-- ''I love to mystify'' is how Astuguevieille describes his aesthetic to Guy Trebay (Page 68) -- and one that I find utterly bewitching. The three homes featured in these pages are all owned by artists -- Astuguevieille, Mats Gustafson, Laurie Simmons -- and it would therefore be tempting to label this an art edition of T. I tend to avoid such tags; they always seem banal and commercially driven. What I would say, however, is that all three spaces are disorienting, dramatic and disarmingly beautiful, qualities that one may associate with art. The Stockholm apartment (Page 78) that Mats Gustafson and his partner, Ted Muehling, escape to from New York, writes Pilar Viladas, is like a 19th-century Scandinavian painting -- all light and shadow and moody palette /-- but entirely contemporary. Laurie Simmons's country retreat (Page 84), as Alix Browne discovers, is a larger-than-even-life-size version of the dollhouse that occupies her work and her dreams. It's a magnificent mix of the vernacular and the visionary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]