Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney once wrote that one of her earliest memories was her longing to be a boy because she felt they got to do more.  At age 4, noticing that her brothers didn’t have long hair, she thought she could fix the problem by cutting off her curls, only to find herself severely punished…

Often behind every great man stands a great woman (or several).  Such is the case with Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of the jeweler, who is well known for his stained glass in windows and lamps…

Set at the highest point in Westchester Country, Kykuit, home to four generations of Rockefellers, can’t be seen from the road. Its grandeur reveals itself slowly. Visitors are shuttled up a long hill from a remote parking lot and at first glance, the house, named after the Dutch word for look out, appears much smaller than its 40 rooms. It’s the grounds with their glorious views and large scale sculpture that first alert one to the specialness of this place.

Did you know that Sylvia Chamberlain from HBO’s The Gilded Age is based on an actual person? Her name was Arabella Worsham Huntington (Belle for short) and this is her closet.

The sour smell of burning tar paper blanketed the air of our small town. We were in the process of replacing the roof before our move. The shingles were still in the home’s barn, but the recently nailed down tar paper was ablaze. It would be almost 2 years before those shingles were installed. We lost the house to both water and fire damage…

“Don’t look back. It’s not where you are going.” I can’t count the many times I have heard that adage as I struggle to survive recent life shocks. But the opposite is true when it comes to decorating in the New Normal.