Polly Devlin - New York Behind Closed Doors

Kenneth Jay Lanes apartment in Murray Hill: the salon ceiling, with a playing card spun up there by a magician many years ago.

Ugo Rondinones bed, Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, by Verne Dawson.

A wall in the Fonseca family house in Greenwich Village

This book is called Places to Write Home About because my only criterion for choosing these apartments, lofts, studios and houses is that I like them so much I want to tell other people about them. They are fired by imagination and created by people who refuse to live in a narrowly functional world; they know that creativity and imagination are essential to our lives.

There is something else. The most important future source of historical information about how some people live in New York today is in books like this and certain magazines. In 1848, the great English historian Lord Macaulay wrote, Readers who take an interest in the progress of civilization and of the useful arts... will perhaps wish that historians of far higher pretensions had sometimes spared a few pages from military evolutions and political intrigues, for the purpose of letting us know how the parlors and bedchambers of our ancestors looked.

So here we are, with no pretensions, in the parlors and bedchambers of artists and writers and garden designers, jewellers and professional decorators, photographers and art dealers, architects and fashion editors in short, the ordinary people of New York in different niches of the city, who opened up their domestic arrangements to show their ways of living idiosyncratic, curated, aesthetic, unique, and also spontaneous, unrehearsed and everyday. Their places are never just stationary backdrops they are provocative presences that elicit interaction, conjured up by people who know that living gracefully does not require attempting the impossible,

In doing this I am merely following in the footsteps of great observers and writers: Mario Prazs masterly An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration , published in London in 1964, was both a love letter and a breakthrough in arousing interest in the art of interior decoration. Peter Thorntons Authentic Decor: The Domestic Interior 16201920 (1984) and Charlotte Geres Nineteenth-Century Decoration: Art of The Interior (1989) were seminal. And, of course, the alluring magazine The World of Interiors , which first appeared in 1981, was a revelation to many though, I have to say, my own reaction on seeing it was, Well! About time too.

Because I grew up in 1950s Northern Ireland, where the decorating ethic in all its fine completeness was Kitchens is Buff and Landings is Brown, where the concept of collecting meant the saving of small pieces of string and brown paper, and where beauty was grimly regarded as an Occasion of Sin, I craved ornament. In The Merchant of Venice , that passionate play about the weights and measures of the heart, Bassanio sighs, The world is still deceived by ornament... the guiled shore To a most dangerous sea. Indeed, indeed, and I hoisted my sail and set out on that sea years and years ago and have now lost sight of the shore. But I dont think Ive been deceived. Ive been delighted and enchanted.

All my adult life I have contrived to live in houses which, crammed with the fruits of my collecting addiction, I think and hope are beautiful if somewhat disconcerting to any minimalist and I have always been obsessive about looking at interiors all over the world, and sometimes writing about them. I hold that making your own environment beautiful is as valid a work of art as any piece of writing, or painting or sculpture; we should approach decoration in the way that we approach the other arts. Yet the handiwork, taste, inspiration and labor that goes into composing a pretty room is too often regarded as happenstance. Women have done it throughout the centuries. Edith Wharton wrote about this; she thought of houses and environments as provocative presences and wrote of how decorating her houses and the creativity involved was essential to her, an act of self-definition, a way of finding her voice. (She was a dab hand at description. The drawing room walls, above their wainscoting of highly varnished mahogany, were hung with salmon-pink damask and adorned with oval portraits of Marie Antoinette and the Princesse de Lamballe. In the center of the florid carpet a gilt table with a top of Mexican onyx sustained a palm in a gilt basket tied with a pink bow. But for this ornament, and a copy of