It was a happy surprise for me to enter this house and to realize that although I was in an entirely different part of Manhattan, I was standing in a townhouse with a layout the mirror image of my own. The owners were a young couple, soon to be married and as excited as two people can only be when they are beginning a new life together. I was impressed by their curiosity and knowledge. They must have seen something in me, for they entrusted me to decorate their home in less than six months.

I sought to establish a balance of the masculine and the feminine—of his and hers. The library walls are covered in burnt-orange corduroy, the dining room walls in amethyst silk moiré. The bedroom walls are paneled in voluptuous, deep turquoise silk velvet. In the office down the hall, a sliding panel in front of the laser-cut metal bookshelves is covered in a grid of coiled bead chain—the same type of chain that GIs hang their dog tags on.