Here's the wireframe.

Please go to the gallery to see it in it's glory. 

Very good render, maybe a printscreen from light setup?

Only two lights. One from the left for the window light and a blue faint light on the right. That's all. The hdri is just for reflection.

Fanstastic job. Love it.

Gorgeous renders! And very nice lighting. I'm amazed it was done with only 2 lights! What's the HDRI? Is it your own or is it available somewhere?

Attached Link: Light Probe Images

Did you converted to panoramic HDRI? Because Carrara dont use this HDRI very well, but for reflections will work fine... well we can use JPG images as HDRI light in Carrara anyway.

I'm assuming you did not use the raytraced DOF (at leas it doesn't look like it).

If you turn that on and jack up the quality, it will harden the photo-realism of it but it will also burn some electrons.  Fortunately for you, you don't have a lot of transparency (that I can see) and that will help.

Thank you for the lightprobe link -- very useful resource

Another question I have: when using Carrara's DOF, do you find it better/more realistic than adding it in postwork? And what are the conditions in which you would deem it much more preferable than postwork even with the additional render time?

A way to get a more real DOF in postwork is using DOF Pro for Photoshop, it use the depth map layers to adjust thye DOF in the postwork, using real distances, so very believeble:

http://www.dofpro.com/

I'll check out DOF Pro.    I don't think Carrara does that bad a job.  At least it gets the depth better than I would be able to manually in PS.   And the more I can do in Carrara the better.   I really only ran an infra-red filter on this one to give it a monochrome feel and bring out the halation on the white pieces.

Just for kicks I ran the render again with raytracing and cranked up the detail.   There's really not a lot of difference at this resolution.  Maybe if I rendered it larger it would be more pronounced.   

Yeah, no transparency.   I've rendered this set in glass before (with IBL) and it's a painful experience.   Maybe when I get my quad core I'll try again.  :)

I've also rendered it, in glass, with IBL in BRYCE.   That one took "a while"

Quote - well we can use JPG images as HDRI light in Carrara anyway.

I meant to pick up on this before.   How do you do this?  Where does it get the light source information from?  I would guess it would go on colour? 

Use Map in the background, Carrara will use color information to light the scene... my first pack of background was all JPG images.

ha.   I had no idea it could do that.  I thought it only got lighting information from the HDRI.    Off to try.

Well what do you know.  All this time I've been faking HDRI with Photomatix and I could have probably got away (some of the time) with jpegs.    As long as there's nothing reflective in the scene that works pretty well.

Sweet job!