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The Egyptian pharaoh and his family occupy a place of honor in the living room of the Ferrieris' Brookline home. Above the orange terra-cotta fireplace, Tut and his family are immortalized in a mural rendered in flat, earthy whites and browns that you'd swear were looted from a tomb in the Valley of Kings.

To their left, Anubis, the guardian of the dead, holds forth. To the right stands the female goddess Isis, poised like a fashion model on a runway, eyes edged in kohl, jet-black hair like raven's wings.

Call it living in the past or wish fulfillment, but the Ferrieris' everything-but-the-kitchen-sphinx style of decorating has provided guests with many ancient evenings.

"The biggest question is, 'When did you go to Egypt?'" Annette Ferrieri says.

"And we've never been there," her husband says.

They might never have to go. It looks as though Egypt has come to them.

Peer amid the tomblike gloom of the room, and sphinxes and pharaohs, in the guise of busts and figurines, stare inscrutably back.

"I've just always found it interesting," Tony Ferrieri says. "The art. The jewelry."

As the production manager and resident set designer for City Theatre on the South Side, Ferrieri has conjured time periods from Renaissance Italy to Elizabethan England to modern-day South Africa. But there's one era he has yet to create.

"I've always wanted to design a set that took place in Egypt, but it hasn't happened," he says.

Their own dynasty began in 1981, the same year the couple were married. Annette Ferrieri joined her husband in the house where he'd lived since he was 6 years old.

"I stayed. She moved here," he jokes.

A female friend began adorning the mantelpiece with hieroglyphics, working freehand with a gold metallic marker. They liked the look. An artist friend was looking for work, so they hired him to paint King Tut and Co. above the fireplace.

The couple also covered the windows. This would seem to constitute a morbid self-entombment, but Annette Ferrieri insists the windows were ugly, provided almost no light and afforded little more than a view of the neighbor's brick wall.

"I wanted those windows covered or gone," she says. "And I hate doing curtains."

To the left, in the corridor that leads to the modern kitchen, hangs a brown window blind that Tony Ferrieri painted with the eye of Horus. It hangs above a glass table, one of several he made using wooden bases discarded from Matthews International Corp., a bronze casting company on West Liberty Avenue. He had the glass tops cut at a local auto glass shop.

On the glass surface, two white plaster sphinxes stand watch. The pair was bought at an antique dealer Uptown. The dealer cast them from a mold he made from the lions that guarded the entrance to the Syria Mosque in Oakland.

Tony Ferrieri also is a devotee of art deco, the glyptic curves and smooth surfaces of which were directly influenced by Egyptian style. Their living room features two art deco reproductions of stools from King Tut's tomb, 1920s vintage.

The Ferrieris gradually added to their Egyptian collection, foraging in flea markets and museum gift shops. A tray on a glass coffee table is adorned with concentric hieroglyphics. Nearby sit two L-shaped halves of a brick-colored velvet sofa to provide seating, a grudging acknowledgement of our present century.

The sofa has appeared in six City Theatre shows, Ferrieri says. "Everything in our house has been onstage at one time or another. My wife says our house is a prop."

Two bunches of papyrus that sit on the mantel look as though they were cut from the banks of the Nile. They actually have a less exotic origin, Annette Ferrieri explains.

"I got them at Big Lots."

What they couldn't buy, her husband created, using the resourcefulness developed from 23 seasons at City Theatre. He customized an overhead light and a pair of lamps on the mantel by making shades out of parchment paper that replicated Egyptian-style oil lamps. He placed a wood cornice over the front window, lending it a Moorish North African look.

He plans to provide visitors with a window to the past by painting a trompe l'oeil of an ancient Egyptian scene, perhaps with the pyramids bulking across an expanse of golden sand.

Other items in the room, such as mugs and wall prints, were gifts from friends.

"People really get into it," Annette Ferrieri says. "People who aren't even close to us. If they find something that looks Egyptian, they'll say, 'Look what I found for you!'"

The hieroglyphics on the mantel do translate into something, Tony Ferrieri says, although an archaeologist might flip if he found it on a tomb somewhere beneath the pyramids of Giza.

The female artist wrote, "Whoever enters this house, may they find peace. Welcome to the Ferrieris + a home of love, joy and happiness. Tony and Annette forever + Live long and prosper."

"The last part is hers," Tony Ferrieri says. "She's a Trekkie."

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