"I feel about my home the way I feel about my music: You have to take chances," says Lionel Richie. "When I wrote 'All Night Long' as well as 'Three Times a Lady,' it was dangerous, because at the time black guys were singing neither calypso songs nor waltzes. But since you only get one shot at life, let's make it a challenge. That's how I feel about this house." And a challenge is exactly what the singer-songwriter got when he snapped up the 28-room mansion, built in 1929 for Carrie Guggenheim by architects Harry Koerner and William J. Gage on a knoll overlooking the Los Angeles Country Club. "It's a house you don't find anywhere, much less 10 minutes from the center of Beverly Hills," he says of the Italian Renaissance Revival structure that hadn't been updated for almost a decade.

"Everybody looked at it and had the same response: 'Beautiful, but we don't want to do the work.' And in fact I was reluctant," he admits. It was his then wife, Diane, who said, "This is fabulous." "So I figured we'd put in a couple million, freshen it up and move in. Three and a half years later, it's still not finished."

"The biggest compliment you can give me," singer-songwriter Lionel Richie says of his Beverly Hills home, "is to walk into any of these rooms and say, 'I can stay here for a while.' " And may never be, since Richie admits that creating music and homes are simultaneous pleasures. The first job for the couple, who remain "great friends," Richie says, was simply uncovering the splendid bones under the kitsch: the gorgeous wood floors, pristine due to years buried under white carpeting; the entrance's luminescent limestone walls, darkened--and hidden--under varnish. "A house is like a human being," muses Richie. "There's something wonderful about an 80-year-old with wisdom, but what did it look like when it was 19? What was the inspiration when the house was first built? That white stone was the house's youth." As for the home's overall mood, "what I'm trying to do here is show travel," says the entertainer, who's always on the road, "and finally I've found a place where I can apply everything I see in other countries." These disparate ideas he trickles back, via photographs sent by e-mail, to the "masters who pull my ideas together"--a team comprising interior designers Peter Schifando and J. Jonathan Joseph and, until his recent death, architect Robert Attree.

A case in point of Richie's inspired wanderlust is the subtle palomino hue of the building's exterior, first spotted on a cardinal's house he saw on a hilltop in Lake Como. And then there's the high-gloss, pale yellow Venetian plaster on the walls of the capacious living room, inspired by Richie's visit to Poland's presidential palace. "The mirrored effect of the walls was so beautiful, I had to ask: How do you do this?" With several layers of paint, buffed and polished like a stone, he learned. "It's not easy to come by, but once it's done, the room can have a single chair and it works." He pauses. "The things that inspire me," he laughs, "were done years ago, with cheap labor and materials. Trying to re-create them has cost me a bloody fortune."

Still, in this moveable feast of the imagination, it's the personal touches that mesmerize: a bronze sculpture depicting Richie's hand intertwined with that of his father; framed letters from Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver to Richie's grandmother, a faculty member at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where the singer grew up; two paintings in the billiard room by jazz trumpeter and pal Miles Davis. The kinetic abstracts ("brilliant, complicated, twisted and turned in every way, just like Miles") are signed on the back: "To the best from the best."

With its high ceilings, dramatic staircases, sweeping promenades and international panache, Richie's manor house could be anywhere in the world--which is just the way he planned it. "I call the rooms in my house destinations. If I want to be in a suite in Paris, I go upstairs to the bedroom and close the door. Italy? I walk outside to the stone path bordering the property and look back to see the cardinal's house. With my career, I have to get on a plane every other week. So when people ask, 'Where do you go for vacation?' I say, 'I go home.' "