Here’s the key to our homes

I instinctively loved decorating from the moment in 1968 I moved into my first apartment with my new husband.  I was 21 and we rented a studio in a tenement building on the Upper East Side for $135 a month. The roaches came for free.

We picked out our bed and dining table from the exquisite furniture department in Lord & Taylor, where my mother–in-law was fashion coordinator and benefited from a 40 percent discount. There I was, earning $105 a week and living in a decrepit building, but dining on a cherry table—real cherry.

Four decades and many apartments later, I’ve spent a fortune on furniture, decorative accessories, renovations, art work, antiques, fabrics, and goodness knows what else, to give personality to my homes. Choosing duvets and sheets became an obsession at one point, but it was a luxury climbing into bed. It also felt great when anyone praised my style.

Our homes are supremely important.   Whether we’re entertaining twenty or all alone in a cozy corner, engrossed in a book, our environment gives us a great deal of pleasure. We love to surround ourselves with objects that “speak“ to us, like the hallway of wonderfully framed family photographs in Catherine and Terry’s homes to the perfectly put together wall of artistic shopping bags that Meryl hung in her Florida getaway.

FOF women know how to transfer their warm and wonderful personalities to the places they live. I’ve seen it time and time again. No one does it better.