In the image you mentioned, I used Mental Ray and Mental Ray material so it's a little different since you're using the software renderer and one of its drawbacks is that it can't render out blurred reflections and that may or may not be a problem when rendering out your metals. And as far as making an environment, you can use simple objects with high incandescence on the shaders to simulate bright areas like a window, an open door etc, you could even create a sphere around your scene and place an image on it, there is also the use of HDRI, it will influence the lighting and reflections but you'd have to ditch the software renderer so that's a different story.