Invariably, grand, formal settings seem to give rise to wicked events. Philip in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope getting undone and shouting, “I never strangled a chicken in my life. … I never strangled a chicken and you know it!” Philip and Brandon, who live in this type of luxurious apartment, get all Leopold-and-Loeb-y and kill their friend David during cocktails because they consider themselves superior to David and plus they want to commit the perfect crime, and later David’s body is in a chest while the other guests are eating and chattering about theater tickets. Then there is Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, Otto Preminger’s Laura and so many others (like the upcoming film The Walker, with Lily Tomlin flipping through upholstery swatches with a cold eye)—all with murder so fitting in satiny places with good linens. Is it because cool, calm, collected sofas and chairs and rare Chinese vases seem like fittings collaborators in the act? Or because the low act of murder is so surprising in stately, noble and exalted rooms (as opposed to in a tenement with tatty wallpaper), rooms that by nature should remain undisturbed?

Jared Goss, associate curator in the department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum, was completely oblivious to these thoughts on a recent afternoon as he flipped through a book on Ivan Fomin, the Russian architect, in the living room of his co-op apartment in an elegant neo-Georgian house on the Upper East Side. Mr. Goss’s only apparent crime seems to be the unstoppable hunger to buy first editions online. Built in 1929 by society architects Cross and Cross for George Whitney—“the first man ever arrested for insider trading,” Mr. Goss said—the house apparently “told him” how it wanted to be furnished, whispering: “Neo-Georgian but not strictly, modern, but soft.” Mr. Goss told his designers (and friends), Tribeca-based William Brockschmidt and Courtney Coleman, what the house said, adding that he wanted the apartment’s set of rooms to be “intimidatingly formal.”

“They turned out to be more glamorous than intimidating,” Ms. Coleman said later. But there is decidedly no bourgeois plopping or pretend, infectious intimacy in Mr. Goss’ rooms. The lean and fitted upholstery was done by Rasheed Khedaru at Second Life Interiors & Upholstery Inc., with, Ms. Coleman said, “a tailor’s meticulous attention to detail.”

Until he was sent off to boarding school, Mr. Goss grew up in a 1932 neo-Georgian home by Gardner Daily, in San Francisco, documented in 1994 in Architectural Digest. In Mr. Goss’ current apartment, the neo-Georgian style is mainly seen in the custom-designed moldings (“the trick to making a room grand,” he said) and in furnishings like the sofa, “vaguely George II.” Even the non-Georgian elements seem in a perpetual state of grace. The bedroom furniture, upholstered in silk with caterpillar fringe, is colored in eau de Nile, a pale watery green that makes one feel as if one is being lightly submerged.

The sky-blue, celadon, green, and straw-yellow faux wood-grain wallpaper, from Old World Weavers in England, reminds Mr. Goss of the pinkish, white-washed plywood in his family’s ranch house in the Napa Valley.

At the Met, Mr. Goss is currently supervising the installation of a French Art Nouveau dining room, designed by Lucien Levy-Dhurmer, to open in December. His own apartment is no period room, spanning as it does the 18th century with the “Spanish or Portuguese ex-voto crystal ship chandelier” in the bathroom, from R. Louis Bofferding; the 19th-century Japanned tea table bought at Sotheby’s; the 20th-century Mark Stock portrait of himself over the mantel and the 21st-century ceramic vases from Pearl River. “Period rooms are not about living today,” he said. They are oddly suspended between one time and another, the sofa wanting, the chair for all the world, neither anyone’s exact past or present, all formed by a historical dream. No one is going to walk in. (Though they are sort of like rooms in a big doll house, with the exciting feeling that a doll is going to hop in at any moment.) It could be winter, summer—the rooms would never know.

Mr. Goss’ own chambers, on the other hand, are hard to imagine in summer or autumn, even though they were visited in a globally warmed fall. His living room, so blue, so white, is decidedly spring, early spring, cold spring with the air from the terrace. When he entertains, he brings out a folding table, the 1910 Austrian silver candelabras believably made for the Wiener Werkstätte and a stack of Philippe Starck transparent Ghost Chairs that hover invisibly for the guests to sit on.

Sitting in the somewhat Lutyens-style double-height living room and sipping water out of beaten silver mint julep cups, they were asked where they got their raspberry silk sofa, the kind that looks as though it were in a room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “At auction,” moaned Ms. Fairfax, fiercely rolling cat hair off the couch’s arm. “Mother had a terrible fire, just when we were to furnish our home. So we have really nothing.”

The authentic is terribly important to Ms. Fairfax, originally from Virginia, then Hawaii, and her husband and business partner, Mr. Sammons, West Virginia and Ohio, both in their 40’s. So too are the glorious architectural achievements of the past. To turn one’s back on human history, as the cold, flat-walled crowd might, is “foolish, and antihumanist,” they say. Their clients believe the same, many of them in Florida and Connecticut—one with a house on 600 acres, with a custom gun cabinet; and then there are all the renovations of townhouses and Park Avenue apartments for Manhattan celebrities: Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, Liv Tyler, scandal-plagued news baron Conrad Black, playwright John Guare and his wife, Adele Chatfield-Tayler, president of the American Academy of Rome, who likes the character of Fairfax’s and Sammons’ residential work so much she wrote the introduction to their book by Mary Miers, American Houses: The Architecture of Fairfax & Sammons (Rizzoli, 2006).

Leafing through their book, with its range of Jacobean, Italian Rustic, Neo-this and Neo-that styles and the kind of houses that look nice with snow on the roof, shadows of branches on the lawn—houses with billiard rooms, flower rooms and boot rooms, and also Jeffersonian loggias, occuli, corner porches, Chippendale fretwork, octagonal rooms, Mount Vernon floorboards and Doric order for the chimney—it came to mind, with a shudder, that Fairfax and Sammons might be postmodernists (a word with 20 different meanings, in this case historically vampiric time travelers). “Absolutely not,” Mr. Sammons said.

“We never accepted modernism in the first place,” said Ms. Fairfax. “‘Modernist’ usually means ignoring or rejecting the lessons of the past which have developed building techniques that celebrated the tectonics of building. How many fabulous cornices have you seen in your life?”

Madly trying to remember.

“They serve a real purpose by shedding the water away from the building.” In modernism, in which the cornice is seen as a useless ornament—“one is left with a dirty stain.”

Mr. Sammons teaches at the New York-based Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America, which he co-founded in 1992. Ms. Fairfax is chairman of the board. Members of the design world are showing up at lectures with ever-increasing frequency, they say. “They’re not the phony ones of the 80’s,” said Mr. Sammons. “They can tell the difference between Ralph Lauren and the real.”

The couple, who met at the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture, lived in a 265-square-foot apartment on Bank Street for 10 years while building up their practice, with a 30-person office on Gansevoort Street in the meat-packing district and another in Palm Beach. When they bought the West Fourth Street place in 2000, it was “at least one level lower than Section 8 housing on the interior,” Ms. Fairfax said; virtually every surface had to be redone.

But the double house came with even more layers of history than the usual New York building. The 1880’s house on the left was a stable to the house behind it, and was later lived in by landscape architect Annette Hoyt Flanders. On the right was a sculpture studio of the designer of the Pierce-Arrow hood ornament. This was 1919, during high bohemia in the West Village, when everyone was up all night doing who knows what. Both were purchased in the 1920’s and joined together by Armand Hammer as his New York residence. No relation to Arm & Hammer baking soda—though he bought a large number of shares in later life—the late Mr. Hammer was a collector, industrialist and exporter of pharmaceuticals and inexpensive pencils to the Soviet Union. “He was nuts,” Mr. Sammons said. “His own aesthetic was absolutely the cheapest possible stuff, parquet floor …”

“A vinyl base,” Ms. Fairfax sniffed.

Off the double-height living room was a secret room: “the Black Pearl,” the couple calls it, painted a smooth black-blue with white trim, like an officer’s coat; a room that hardly anyone wants to leave, they said, especially after cocktails. When the shutters to West Fourth Street are closed, not a sound comes through.

“People need shutters,” Ms. Sammons said. “Not double-paned windows.”

To live with a model must be like living with a precious vase or something really valuable, like the Unicorn Tapestry. “She’s always easy on the eye,” said the husband, Gary Gold, a longtime drummer and music producer who has played with Keith Richards, B.B. King and Chuck Berry, and made albums for Smokey Robinson (the 2007 Grammy-nominated Timeless Love), Bonnie Raitt and the Neville Brothers. “I know a lot of models,” he said. “She’s just a special one from the bunch for me. Sometimes I see her”—maybe standing near the piano that Mr. Gold used to play for comedy acts at Catch a Rising Star, where John Belushi broke the piano keys—“and I’ll be struck, and she looks like a statue to me, like an alabaster statue, like wow. I just wonder.”

Neither Mr. Gold nor Ms. Sandberg would give their ages. She is tall and pale, otherworldly, sort of pre-cog: as if she has just risen out of the Philip Dick story where those psychic people live in a tub of water in a constant state of sleep. She is in magazines most of the time: Vogue, Elle, and in ad campaigns ranging from Barneys to Fendi to (soon) Banana Republic. Of course she has been on every runway from New York to Paris to Milan, which is where she met Mr. Gold, who had been brought by friends—“one of us was a movie star”—in sort of an Entourage situation, to a Donatella Versace after-party in 2000.

“What was it called?” Ms. Sandberg said, trying to remember the venue, holding a cherry stem in the air.

“Via marble. I don’t know,” Mr. Gold said. “Everything was marble.”

The couple is bicoastal. When not in their 2,200-square-foot sort-of-renovated loft that Mr. Gold has rented for 20 years (they sublet two thirds of it to a fashion photographer) or having a romantic dinner at Whole Foods, their “favorite,” they occupy a rented three-bedroom 1929 Mediterranean-style house in Beachwood Canyon, next to the Charlie Chaplin mansion, with one of those empty flat green lawns. Ms. Sandberg has a lot of Jonathan Adler in the West Coast home. “I love Jonathan Adler,” she said. Doesn’t everyone? But does a room need any sort of décor when the occupant is so beautiful, moving like a perfect crane, perhaps holding meager bits of broccoli? The model takes over the design, upstages all the tables, just so many sticks.

To live with Ms. Sandberg must be like living with many beings. Looking at her portfolio, she strangely becomes another person in every shot: dangerous and leathery on a wet street; or Monica Vitti with big dark glasses and disconnected in space; or a frozen, smiling doll. “Makeup artists say quite often that my face is like a blank canvas,” she said. “Um, I absorb what’s around me. Like a sponge.” In the evening, she and Mr. Gold eat “only three cookies each” in front of the television. They married two years ago in Rochester, Minnesota, where Ms. Sandberg came from a family of seven. “Watermelon and children running around,” said Mr. Gold, raised in the Five Towns of Long Island. “We were both in Marc Jacobs, head to toe.”

“I wore hot pink,” Ms Sandberg reminisced. Inevitably, she is making her way into film. In The Devil Wears Prada, she played the cafeteria-goer who looks down scornfully at Anne Hathaway’s fattening corn chowder. Next is a small part in Old Dogs, with John Travolta and Robin Williams.

Their early 20th-century building, with the usual brutal New York City brick walls that say others have been here before you and others will follow, has housed famous musicians for decades: Mr. Gold’s “closest friend,” jazz saxophonist Michael Brecker, who died in January; the late keyboard player Don Grolnick, who played with James Taylor for years; and Saturday Night Life drummer Chris Parker, from the famous Parker family of Westchester, a birth miracle in which four of the five sons is a drummer. Mr. Gold uses Mr. Parker’s drum isolation booth upstairs, an interesting architectural specialty made of truck tires, plywood and foam. “A room within a room,” he said.

Slideshow

Come Take a Tour With Tony

“Hel-lo, come in,” Mr. Roberts said in that big voice. He was not in a safari jacket with a little belt, and his curly hair is silvery instead of brown because he is now 67, and Woody Allen was not squirming next to him—but still there was the tall, handsome man (the normal one as opposed to the neurotic), nonchalant, hands in pockets, the direct gaze, head held down and out, the way a tall man graciously does to those slightly shorter so he could understand and take in all that one was saying. Everybody probably thinks he lives in an apartment with Diane Keaton and a wooden salad bowl, and in fact his spacious prewar co-op apartment is furnished not unlike an early-1980’s Woody Allen movie: amber light from the lamps, wooden furniture, comfy plaid chairs. “I wish I had a terrace, a view of the park,” Mr. Roberts said. But: “I have a desk, a place to eat. This is what it is. I like it. It’s enough.”

The actor has lived in the apartment for almost 30 years, moving in back when it was rent-controlled. “I was lucky,” he said. “I had to grease somebody’s palm. I was in They’re Playing Our Song. I needed a larger apartment. My daughter was growing up and she needed her own room.” His four-year marriage, to former dancer Jennifer Lyons, ended in 1975. “I bribed my landlord to get me something larger. He said, ‘Now can I have opening night tickets?’” Mr. Roberts bought the place when it went co-op in 1988. He lives there alone, he said, though the housekeeper came through with a spray bottle.

He grew up in New York, taking the number 3 bus, attending P.S. 6 and the High School of Music and Art. “My father’s family was very poor, Lower East Side, then they moved to the Bronx. My mother’s father was on ll9th, then fashionable. Their fortune came undone with the crash.” Mr. Roberts’ father, Ken Roberts, became famous in the days of radio, another Woody Allen world. “He was master of ceremonies for some of the biggest hits,” Roberts fils said, mentioning Quick as a Flash at the Ed Sullivan Theater in Times Square, now the grubby Gothic doorway that opens to The Late Show With David Letterman. People would hear clues. “When they thought they knew the answer, they would buzz the buzzer.” (Oh, for back then when figuring out a clue was all that mattered!) “My father knew the ups and downs of the business,” Mr. Roberts said. “It’s a short run even when it’s a long run. The happiest moment for an actor is when he’s working. Otherwise he could end up being a waiter for the rest of his life. Because you love the theater, you take that chance with your life. You just can’t do it alone. You can’t get your jollies doing monologues in the apartment.”

Mr. Roberts has known more ups than downs. Perhaps best known for Annie Hall, Play It Again, Sam and A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, he has also appeared in Serpico, Amityville, Victor/Victoria, Promises, Promises and even Edge of Night. Women in the 1950’s would pull him aside in the basement of Macy’s and scream, “You’re Lee. I’ve seen you in my bathrobe.” There were Neil Simon plays and many musical comedies. Right now he plays Zeus in the musical Xanadu under flashing pink and green lights. “It’s a party, ” he said—a decided contrast, say, from playing Hamm in End Game, playing it blind, with his eyes closed the whole time. “So black, so dark, so gloomy. I missed seeing the other actors. It was very lonely there.”

On his off hours, Mr. Roberts works on his memoirs, though he is concerned they will not be as dramatic as his friend Donna McKechnie’s. “Let’s face it—I wasn’t a longshoreman,” he said. “I’ve had a charmed life.” He likes to walk across Central Park with his iPod—“with the shuffle on so I’m surprised,” he said—and takes a stretch dance class taught by Luigi Facciuto, now 82, on 68th Street. “Luigi taught everybody who danced on Broadway. He was Gene Kelly’s sidekick in movies. There are 20 to 30 people in the class sometimes, Lisa Minnelli, Ben Vereen, Donna McKechnie. It’s a very healthful regimen.”

Mr. Roberts used to own a house in Amagansett, but sold it five years ago. “I couldn’t afford it,” he said.

“Actors’ fortunes shift. I got tired being afraid during the down times, seeing that the lawn is mowed properly in between shows.”

He said he still sees and talks to Mr. Allen. “We were friends and had identifiable repartee,” he said of their collaborations. “When they see intimacy, it was real.”

Talking to Mr. Roberts, an indelible icon of the early Woody Allen period, stirred up feelings of a world that has passed, when people spent enormous amounts of time thinking about sexual performance and taking Darvons.

Does he long for the New York of the 1970’s, more romantic, though yes, dangerous with cracks and holes and people acting like savages?

“No, not at all,” Mr. Roberts said. “I was downtown on Wall Street this morning, the FDR Drive. I couldn’t believe how spiffy and sparkly it looks, like Oz. The city looks like it works.”

Mr. Bart, 43, born and raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, now living in Brooklyn Heights, leads a glamorous New York life that never stops. Recently he was asked to escort Naomi Campbell to the Met Costume Ball (there were no incidents), and then there was the CFDA awards dinner and the Chanel-sponsored screening of La Vie en Rose. “You take a Xanax and you go,” said Mr. Bart.

Therapeutic, too, has been this 1932 bungalow with a cheery look that hugs one of the 99 lakes and ponds in Southampton’s North Sea area. It resembles the shores of Gitchee Gumee: all Girl Scout, Boy Scout, marshmallows. There are many little Depression-era bungalows where people used to play gin rummy and eat bologna or liverwurst while listening to the sound of the towels in the dryer, and perhaps a skinny boy sitting in a muddy inner tube on the mosquito-covered ground. Most of these houses are passed down, family to family, though people are getting smarter and a few appear on the market now and then. There is always an eager offspring who can be seduced to sell. Mr. Bart’s closing was quite emotional. “The former owner, 96, was going to assisted living,” he said around a table of cherries and blue cheese one late Sunday afternoon, with a frog croaking in the background. “There was a reading. I got verklempt.”

Mr. Bart’s sentimentality didn’t extend to the house’s infrastructure. He crashed through a wall to get an open feeling, and eliminated a shed with a washer and dryer so the master bedroom could face the pond. (The predominant colors are blue and sage-green, with sparkling white bathrooms.)

North Sea in general is not at all like the high-powered, movie-star beach crowd with crashing waves, S.U.V.’s going over people’s feet and laughter at having all the money and power. The crowd on the ocean side is always either eating refined salmon in modernist glass structures or sitting in a lonely room with lots of molding in some neo-traditional, endlessly wide mansion drinking themselves to death because, though they don’t know it, they have too much space. They rarely understand the sea-haunted youth (Alastair Gordon’s Weekend Utopia), which is what most of the Hamptons used to be about.

There are also differences between pond people and ocean people when it comes to tragedy. Still waters are always about people drowning—Leave Her to Heaven, A Place in the Sun—whereas crashing ocean waves are all about disappearance—Under the Sand, and the real-life Hamptons mystery of architect Norman Jaffee, who went swimming one day in 1993 and never returned. Ocean people are usually tanner than pond people.

Former Andy Warhol Factory girl Richie Berlin is also staying near one of the ponds, neighbors say. Not far from Mr. Bart, Manhattan film publicist Frank Lomento and interior designer Michael Stone have a stucco house—at 499 square feet, “it must be the smallest in the Hamptons,” Mr. Lomento said—with a flat roof and a parapet, original brown-and-yellow linoleum in the kitchen, and cabinets with medieval Robin Hood fixtures. They will never forget when they asked for a “fixer-upper for under $200,000” six years ago in a Southampton real-estate office and a former dentist, now realtor, laughed in their face (he called a year later with the listing). Mr. Bart’s good friend, Fern Mallis, executive director of Seventh on Sixth, has been coming to the area for some two decades; 11 years ago, she bought a two-story house on a pond near his. “I call it Swan Lake because there are always two swans on the lake,” she said. A visit included a viewing of her miniature-chair collection.

Something about the area seems to encourage dreamy, nostalgic pastimes in their inhabitants. Mr. Bart takes long kayak rides in the morning and night to still his restless spirit, or he reads Canoe Mates in Canada by St. George Rathborne, who also wrote The House Boat Boys and Chums in Dixie, or he leafs through his At Ease: Navy Men of World War II picture book. (Though he had a moment of upset when a friend was cutting open an apricot and discussing her upcoming Fabien Baron sunglasses shoot and he came out from the kitchen holding a bottle, fire in his eyes: “Who put the red in the refrigerator?”)

But far from being a recluse, Mr. Bart said he is partaking of all the Hamptons tent parties and the “new things happening,” like gay karaoke at Almondito. (“I brought in Kelly Bensimon,” he said, referring to a Hamptons socialite, many of whom seem to be named Kelly.) “She sang ‘Elivira.’”

Mr. Bart added that he has total access to all the salt spray of ocean life, splashing at Fowler Beach in Southampton or Montauk, 25 minutes away. He has a very “spiritual relationship to water” ever since he grew up in Bensonhurst, on his mother’s secretary’s salary, bicycle-riding on the bay. “See that body of water?” he said. “All of that can come into me if I could only have a funnel, drain the water, and have it come through me.” It sounded like a colon cleansing. Still, one could sense how summer and weekend places tug at the soul: With desire for immersive oblivion on one end and, on the other, the compulsion to keep in touch with one’s own kind, or one falls off the radar and is dead, floating around in the darkest parts of outer space like a miniature astronaut without a breathing tube.

Perhaps. In a sometimes-shoddy age, Jonah Zuckerman, a designer and master craftsman of contemporary furniture using traditional techniques and materials, has a relentless drive to make perfect things.

A Harvard-trained architect and Fulbright scholar, Mr. Zuckerman started his business 10 years ago—coincidentally just when big changes began happening in New York. Now the rich are richer and are spending more on higher-priced, handmade custom furniture. The not-so-rich may be wearying of the sameness of available brands. (BKLYN Designs, Dumbo’s yearly furniture show, reported 65 designer exhibits this year, compared with 30 in its first year, five years ago.) There is the rocketing use of advanced software systems and flexible computer-aided manufacturing systems to produce custom output at less cost. There is just a general “special-for-me” expectation these days that goes anywhere from programming a home page or holding up a line of people to make a complicated request for a certain kind of latte, to people who not only have custom furniture made, but custom floors, stairwells, bookcases, carpets, upholstery, embroidered linens, lighting for the paintings, lighting for the sculptures, lighting for the dog, and then long intimate talks with the audio-video designer—a major character in the drama of custom-made homes—and later nobody knows how to turn on the television.

Slideshow

The Custom Furniture
Is Always Right

Visiting Mr. Zuckerman’s City Joinery shop in a factory building in 19th-century-like Dumbo, with the Belgian cobblestones and old train tracks in the streets, was like being in a beaver pond. There was all this wood and men discussing wood in low tones. Mr. Zuckerman conducted a tour of the 6,000-square-foot shop, where he and his eight employees make custom furniture and his own standard designs that sound like the names of modern dance pieces—“Leaning Shelves,” “Hovering Bed,” “Aspiration Lamp Table.” He began with an impassioned monologue on wood. “Cherry! Maple! Walnut! We had a giant sycamore.” Mr. Zuckerman pointed to a big log of which he was particularly proud. “Sassafras,” he said. He explained that while it is a chestnut substitute, he has never seen any mass-market furniture in the material. “It has a wonderful curl.” Most Americans like things dark, he said. “One of the most desirable is Mexican ebony. Unfortunately, I really shouldn’t be working with it. It’s endangered. In theory, harvesting, exporting in Mexico is prohibited by the government. I care about these things, but there are limits.”

A discussion of mass customization and sociologist Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave, about the effects of the information age on economics, politics, and culture, ensued. Mr. Zuckerman’s cousin Paul Freedman, who has similar concerns as a custom bicycle entrepreneur (Fossil Fool and Rock the Bike), was visiting and chimed in. Mr. Zuckerman, who has made many a “special” handcrafted table for movie stars, could not say enough about computer-aided systems. He will use them, for example, to make 26 chairs for a clothing showroom. “You can draw something, the computer figures how, and—sis-boom-bah—the computer will basically create all of the tool paths for the piece,” Mr. Zuckerman said. Although “we only use C.N.C. [computer numerically controlled milling machines] for jobs that are big enough to justify,” he recently used the mass customization tool for a new design: “a new bookshelf that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. It has an aluminum component. I could have done it all by hand, but I did it on C.N.C. because it has more precision. It probably cost me more, but it has a perfect evenness and crispness.”

What would William Morris have thought about all this mass customization? Before his era, “furniture was pretty much mass-produced,” Mr. Zuckerman said, referring to the Industrial Revolution. “They started to use carving machines and cheap industrial labor to do carvings over and over again, where the person doing the carving had no say in the design.” But C.N.C. production, he said, is the opposite of dehumanizing, because the person running the machine is a very skilled laborer and to some extent has to be a designer. “In my experience with C.N.C., there is dramatic improvement with quality,” Mr. Zuckerman said. Still, he said, “I don’t want to use it all the time. We like doing things by hand. I would want to keep it to a healthy minimum.”

Mr. Zuckerman comes from a thoughtful background, the son of an architect/engineer and literary agent in Douglaston, Queens, with a family dog named Pushkin. His sister is a pastry chef at Chanterelle. His wife, Rebecca Busansky, is a labor-market consultant who works at the Pratt Center for Community Development. They have three children.

Like anyone in the world of custom businesses, Mr. Zuckerman has encountered odd and exciting human desires. He had a project that involved “integral” nightstands. “A lady wanted a shelf for his-and-her shotguns,” he said. “They lived in the countryside. They said there are a lot of mountain lions. They wanted it discreet. A single investment banker in Chelsea wanted something modern, feminine and in the spirit of a sleigh bed.” Then there was the coin scholar. “This woman was finishing her doctorate. Her husband bought her this desk so she could finish her dissertation. There was a discussion of the coin books that she would need to have on her desk, big books. We did it in flame birch.”

Tables can involve hours of discussion. “A table is a big issue: length, expandable or not, where to sit when there are just two of you,” Mr. Zuckerman said. “Do you like to cross your legs at a table? What kind of social space? Long, narrow is very intimate. A lot of decorators like really wide tables. That is old style. You formally have to be served.”

Custom-made objects invariably take all involved into the sometimes dark and troublesome closet of collaboration that exists in theater and marriage. Every decision takes on the emotional weight of the whole relationship. Or sometimes it is simply a matter of “Sam, you made the pants too long,” or “I changed my mind after you started.”

“People come in,” Mr. Zuckerman said. “They say, ‘I love your work and I want a bed unique to me.’ We used to look at art history books. Now we have a portfolio with hundreds of pieces. Sometimes clients are incredible sources of inspiration and good ideas, and sometimes quite the opposite. They sometimes become so willful in the process and indecisive, they don’t want to just trust me to guide the process. They assert themselves even though they don’t know what they’re doing. I made a table, buffet and bed for a young, hip, artsy couple. He was an early dot-com billionaire. They were basically retired and did cool projects from their loft but they wanted their say in every line and every dimension. In the end, I thought the pieces were really stupid. They didn’t have the clarity my things usually have.”

Though there are many other clients, he said, who instantly “become my muses.”

In Manhattan, where people already have a complicated, neither-with-you-nor-without-you relationship with the outdoors, furnishing the outdoor space, however large or small, can send one into the house of Bedlam. Wind on a large terrace, penthouse deck or balcony will blow lightweight furniture away, and then you will lose it, a sinking feeling—or, worse, the furniture will hit someone or crash into his topiary, and then he will sue you. Plastic furniture, if it is too light, will make you run after it. You will find yourself going down with your bubble chair to the ground. People with a small yard in between buildings should really rejoice. They are protected on the sides and can get the snazzy synthetics—a polyethylene chair named Jellyfish or foam-injected sofas or seating made of “eco-friendly” vinyl webbing, the new wicker. Vast penthouse terraces—the higher you go, the harder you fall—are open to everything, sparks dropping from Blade Runner flying machines in the night sky.

Corcoran broker Sharon Held bought such a heavy sofa for her 3,700-square-foot wrap terrace around the Gretsch Building in Williamsburg that delivery was halted. “They needed more men,” she said.

Barbara Israel of Barbara Israel Garden Antiques “won’t even discuss plastic.” She is all for cast iron. “It will sit like a stone,” she said. “It never moves.” But does one really want a 19th-century loveseat with lilies of valley and ferns outside while the Barcelona and Eames chairs are inside? So many in town are modernists these days. Everyone is supposed to worry about indoor-outdoor flow, ever since Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe broke down the barriers, projecting into the landscape, making the boundaries invisible. George Washington, from an earlier time, was not concerned. “He had 35 Windsor chairs that he brought into the garden when he had guests,” Ms. Israel said.

If you are getting into heavy stone fountains, think deeply. Buildings have weight requirements. “All buildings are engineered for a certain amount of poundage per square foot,” said Manhattan landscape designer Jeff Mendoza. “Though rarely are buildings concerned about the weight of furniture. Planters and soil are the big concern.”

Rain is another issue. “Cast iron rusts,” Ms. Israel said, “especially the white.” Though there are all sorts of new coated metals today, a big population inside the city and out abides by teak, which is not only heavy (though if a hurricane arrives in New York, nothing will be heavy enough), but looks great after it rains, changing over time to a silvery patina, like an elder becoming wiser.

“Teak is the most durable,” said furniture designer John Danzer, founder of Munder-Skiles on Madison Avenue. “It’s a hard wood, slow-growing, so it can withstand all the elements—rain, sleet, cold, the burning sun.” Though it can have a hard time with red wine, ketchup and olive oil.

According to Mr. Danzer, the insects of New York aren’t interested in this unfamiliar, exotic wood. Tell that to Richard Griffin’s landlord, who left a little grass in his Greenpoint backyard but is talking about concreting it over. “They think it lets in bugs,” said Mr. Griffin, an advertising copywriter who used to have a wooden table, but “they thought it was suspicious and replaced it with a plastic one.”

Another struggle is the sun. “You don’t want to burn your bottom,” Mr. Danzer said. He makes the wooden backs and seats of his metal chairs curved so people do not need cushions. “Cushions get filthy in the city. Then where do you store them?” In his other business, as an “exterior decorator,” he might have a little closet built near the outdoor space, just for the cushions to rest. He has clients, he said, who store by tying up everything with bungee cords.

Then there is the matter of setting, scale and proportion. If you have bonsai trees, you will need smaller furniture. If you have a labyrinth, you won’t need any because it is all about walking, puzzling, stolen kisses, general disappearance and, heaven forbid, murder. Ms. Israel is all for putting small-scale animal statues—“36-, 46-inch statues that are intimate”—just outside the window so they can be seen from inside. A cast-iron Newfoundland dog is on her Web site—though the best-sellers are classical statues of women, in just a little drapery, holding up one arm.

If one wants to fall asleep and have a forest dream of a dark forest, there is boiserie, the French tradition of twisted branches becoming furniture, and now faux bois made of steel or twisted wire and lookin g like gnarling tree trunks that come alive and can lift a person off the ground and toss her into the air.

But forgo the Adirondack style, though heavy and non-moving—that is for people when they are old and watching the sun set and that’s going to be it, leaning back for the ride into the unknown.

In fact, you may need to forgo all of it. Mr. Danzer, who recently worked on a terrace that could fit only a long, narrow table—seating was one-sided, so that everyone could enjoy the view—observed that outdoor space is getting smaller in new developments. “A lot of terraces in the city are about getting fresh air and having to something to look out at, not for spending a lot of time on,” he said. “Sometimes stepping out and having a cigarette is all you get.”

Like all collecting worlds, the object and craft crowd has many subcultures within. There are those who collect ceramics; others, baskets, glass, textiles, jewelry. Some collect pieces that actually hold things; other pieces look like they might have at one time. Some collect all media, while others—like the glass people—will not touch anything but glass. “They’re very narrow-minded,” said Mr. Isles, 46, standing in his 4,800-square-foot downtown loft, which has about 300 pieces of art—functional and not. Mr. Isles’ collection is “only 50 percent craft—mostly glass.” The rest is fine art, like the collection that he grew up with in his banking family’s home on the Upper East Side.

“Craft collectors in general don’t see beyond the craft,” said Mr. Isles, standing near a light-blue glass torso of a man with blue hair and big round ears called Dumbell. “If you show a glass collector an artist’s work on glass, and then the same artist’s work on Plexiglas, the collector won’t buy the Plexiglas one. To me it’s absurd, because it’s all about the material rather than the painting. There are glass clubs. Most glass collectors buy in color. It’s all about the color. It’s rarely about something else.”

The distinction between fine arts and crafts involves, for some—others see no distinction—both money (more for fine art) and the desire to create something more than just a functioning pot, vase or basket. Since the early to mid–20th century, the Studio Craft Movement brought about a revolt against function. Peter Voulkos, in the 1950’s and 60’s, was one of the first to cross the craft/fine art divide, making big, tough Abstract Expressionist ceramics and putting holes in his pots so they couldn’t possibly function (and thus were more than mere containers). Of course, one could jump back to Plato, when the great contributor to the harmony of the state was the one who could build the great utilitarian object.

Today, gallery owners are pushing the word “conceptual.” Many are making and collecting “conceptual ceramics”—the witty vase expressing globalism and the human condition—and “conceptual jewelry”: jewelry with a brain, a ring covered with skyscrapers. Ask someone what a “sculptural object” is and they’ll invariably say that it is more than craft, which makes one wonder why can’t it just be exquisite craft—some perfectly glazed bowl. On the other hand, why does it have to be craft in the first place? Couldn’t the artists wake up one day and start creating sculptures, just take a feeling or idea and go with it instead of making a pot more than it is, into something it’s not, not a pot but …. What about the craft collectors? Do they think people coming out of a craft tradition are more sincere, more authentic, and not some smarty-pants artist? Or does everyone feel more comfortable collecting objects that come out of a functional tradition?

A local fine-arts sculptor believes that all the new language is suspect. “When they say ‘sculptural objects,’ it’s a code word for saying craft is as good as sculpture,” he said. “Look at craft magazines: There’s nothing you could put candy in. Yet they are not quite sculptures, because they are more obsessively about the material. I don’t know why—there’s always something missing. Some things I like, but there’s a weakness in it I can’t put my finger on. In crafts, they sort of fetishize surfaces to a degree. A lot of these sculptural objects, they have something obsessive about the surfaces. It seems too important.”

Many collectors love these objects just for their textural excessiveness. Marc Steglitz, chief operating officer of the Guggenheim Foundation, and his wife Ilene, a digital artist, collect heads in every media, four of which weigh 300 pounds each. “We like things that are in your face,” he said. “I’ve talked to art historians, professors of fine art. They think that line between craft and fine arts is very thin.” He finds the surfaces of the pieces appealing. “One time, a psychiatrist came over and said, ‘What’s with you and the heads?’ I’m not very deep on this.”

David Ling, an architect who’s worked with I.M Pei and Richard Meier and designed the Blue Man Group’s house, among other high-end residences, has a craft collection that includes a Toshiko Takezu bowl, which he showed off recently in his two-story office/studio (which itself is like a highly sophisticated piece of craft, with a waterfall, two moats, and steel cones for showering and meditating). Mr. Ling said that he prefers the work of craft artists, like fiber artist Lenore Tawney, simply for its “amazing materiality, the amazing detail.” Going against the grain, as it were, of the new world of “conceptual craft,” he prefers work that is “less conceptual, less narrative—and a lot to do with technique, and when artisanal aspects are played up.”

While Mr. Ling was working on a house for a trustee at the Museum of Arts and Design (five years ago, they changed their name from the American Craft Museum because people thought it meant folk art), he was influenced by their collection, he said, and “found myself doing more and more textured, rustic shapes.” The whole business is catching on: Among Mr. Ling’s other clients are Barry Fisher, a retired lawyer, and his wife, who collect mostly baskets and ceramics—Toshiko Takezu, Richard DeVore, Wayne Higby—in their Gramercy Park duplex and house in New Jersey. “We like having something you can touch,” Mr. Fisher said.

Midnight-blue glazed terra cotta, all full of inky depth, will surround the lower portion of architect Annabelle Selldorf’s 520 West Chelsea condominium building on 19th Street. At Ms. Selldorf’s 200 11th Avenue, where people will drive their cars into their apartments, cast gunmetal glazed terra cotta is to cover the base, making curves and warmth in a cold, sharp world.

The upcoming Museum of Arts and Design (M.A.D.) building—the former “Lollipop Building” at 2 Columbus Circle—will reportedly be faced with lustrous, iridescent terra cotta along with the glass, though the building is enshrouded now and no one is quite sure what is going on underneath. Terra cotta hasn’t been in fashion since the 1930’s, when the Great Depression stopped construction and modernism subsequently brought in more machine-age textures.

And the days of flurries of terra-cotta leaves and grapes are probably gone: no more ruffled flounces, no more cupcake look or theatrical flourishes. Terra cotta always had a stagy quality, partly because one sees it applied in pieces since it is baked in parts, in kilns. So there is always the sense that terra cotta is pretending to be a big surface. There is the charm of the clay, the touch of the hand pulling it out of the mold. Look inside old pieces and one sees thumbprints.

Today, you wouldn’t recognize it. Terra cotta looks entirely modern, its cheeks pulled in, as if it has been going to a gym, all flat, perfect little blocks or rectangles. These are shapes comfortable to the modern age, a celebration of the uncluttered yet ornamental in its textural effect. For no matter how modern we all are, we will doodle a bit.

Sara Lopergolo, a partner at Ms. Selldorf’s firm, said that they chose terra cotta not only because a lot of the city “was built with that material on the exterior,” but because “the material, the color has a depth you just don’t see any more.” And, she added, “it picks up light once it’s curved …. All the architects are excited the way the terra-cotta glaze reflects light, and especially that of glass around it.”

Terra cotta means “burnt earth”; it is essentially fired clay. There is something volcanic in the way the shapes are stopped in motion, a bit like photography, that second in existence held right there, a dramatic hold-your-breath moment, forever stopped in motion, lava about to overwhelm—then it’s held back by fire and cooked. Not at all like stone, which looks exactly what it sounds like, a more graveyard sort of thing.

Terra cotta has its own organization, the Friends of Terra Cotta. Do they sit about staring at pediments with terra-cotta seashells in each other’s living rooms? “Polishing terra cotta with our shirtsleeves?” said Simeon Bankoff, executive director of the Historic Districts Council. “No. We get newsletters. We have chapters. We do not ‘take it for granite.’” Mr. Bankoff was referring to the second half of the title of one of Friends president Susan Tunick’s many terra-cotta books. Ms. Tunick quotes a 1911 New York Times article describing the city’s skyline as “more than half architectural terra cotta.”

Building façades were cheerfully ornamented with its natural clay color or glazed in yellow, green, blue, silver and gold. Even on the darkest days, tenement buildings had masonry façades full of ruffled glory. So many of New York’s boldface names have it: the Flatiron, the Woolworth, Louis Sullivan’s Bayard-Condict on Bleecker, Judson Memorial Church, and the Fred French building with madly colored beehives, griffins and a rising sun. A favorite is the green terra-cotta trim on the First Presbyterian Church chapter house at 12 West 12th Street, which always seemed to be a mysterious building in a Chinese garden, though it’s not Chinese at all. It was built in the late 1950’s by a Frank Lloyd Wright disciple, thus the horizontalness, but the particular shade of terra-cotta green makes it almost like jade.

Terra cotta was a little hero that could do no wrong. Its ornamental and fireproofing qualities and increased availability led to its use from the 1880’s through the 1920’s on building façades, rooflines and lobbies—and of course, inside Grand Central Terminal. Terra cotta was cheaper than stone. According to Ms. Tunick’s entry in The New York City Encyclopedia, after James Renwick in the 19th century engaged a sewer-pipe factory to manufacture cornices and window surrounds as a cheaper substitute for cut stone, stone cutters and masons got upset that terra cotta would endanger their livelihood. They helped keep it out of the city for years. The terra-cotta wars, one might say!

That was then.

The other day, architect John Cetra calmly stood in his 584 Broadway office stroking a 110-year-old scrolled pediment that had framed a brownstone on East 66th Street. “There is a depth to the material you don’t see in stone,” he said. “We just love the look of it. Look at those fissures. Of course, that comes from water that is trapped inside. New systems are using terra cotta very differently—it’s being designed so water will not be trapped.” Mr. Cetra and his wife and partner, Nancy Ruddy, recently used red terra cotta from Germany on the sides and at the setbacks of the glass-curtain wall of the Ariel East at 2628 Broadway. “We incorporated it into the glass,” he said. “It becomes a tracery to give the building some distinction, but also to relate it to the Metro Theater to the west.” Cetra/Ruddy also did a condominium conversion of the turn-of-the-century 141 Fifth Avenue, which has terra cotta on the cornice, over the entrance, everywhere. Developers believe people will pay more to live within the confines of madly swirling and curling terra cotta. Though 141 Fifth Avenue’s Core Group Marketing C.E.O., Shaun Osher, will never forget the penthouse of the Police Building on Centre Street that he sold with the 35-foot terra-cotta ceiling. “The woman covered it up,” he said.

Two examples at 995 Fifth Avenue—a conversion of the former Stanhope Hotel across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, built in 1926, now with some 26 half- and full-floor homes—gave a sense of humans who were about to come back, even though they never existed in the first place. They are two imaginary families who are, of course, rich and have never failed in any way.

Their creator is New York City designer Eric Cohler, who designed the building’s interior finishes. Sitting in Five North, the “Traditional Apartment” (with a piano that looks right out on the museum, which is the most stable institution in the world and who wouldn’t want to face it always?), Mr. Cohler said of his fictional tenants: “He’s a Harvard M.B.A., mid-50’s. She’s 38, from Paris, and grew up in the 16th Arrondissement. They have two children from his first marriage—a boy at Princeton, a daughter at Spence. His former wife lives on Park and 88th. They have a little boy together. He goes to the Lycée because his mother’s French …. ” In the Smallbone of Devizes kitchen were the little boy’s basketball hoop and the mother’s herbs from Provence. Photographs of the imaginary family were scattered around the apartment. One was borrowed from a grandmother whom Mr. Cohler knows.

His story continued: “The Coromandel screen is a nod to Coco Chanel, one of her grandmother’s dear friends. You’re sitting on her grandmother’s Louis XVI chair.” Where did her grandmother live? “She lived on the Bois de Boulogne. She was a, ah, hat designer; she was married to a former member of the French Resistance …. ”

Slideshow

A Model Home

There was more, but the couple in the “Contemporary” apartment next-door, all full of Roche Bobois, and a Hermès sheared yak throw, were even better. “She’s editor of a major fashion magazine, late 40’s,” Mr. Cohler said. “He is a physician at Lenox Hill Hospital, heart surgeon. They met at the University of Michigan. They are very conscientious about greening. They drive a hybrid car. The concierge parks it in the Metropolitan Museum lot that comes with the apartment. They used to have a Jaguar convertible; she made him give it up. They go to the park. They hold hands.” We looked at her Chanel cosmetics in one of the bathrooms—one a gripping pale-green glass tile—and in the closet, the Asprey bag. In one of the guest rooms, the Lichtenstein they bought in college. “African art, they love,” Mr. Cohler said. “She went with him to Kenya when he was working in a hospital outside Nairobi with some tribal members …. ”

What tribal members? Watching Mr. Cohler in his Paul Stuart jacket, Oliver Peoples aviator sunglasses, fingering a copper bowl with a gilded lining, was like watching Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects make a story out of the bottom of a coffee cup.

It is not unusual for architects and designers to prepare a brief for design after interviewing existent clients, or for students to be given a “prospective client,” but Mr. Cohler—master’s degree in historic preservation from Columbia, constantly picking up lint from the carpet—takes it to its furthest point. “I really tried to make it real,” he said. “Why shouldn’t it be real? I do that with my client. I have to have a conceit. It is as though I’m an artist. I’ve been given raw clay.” Mr. Cohler, who also created the model apartments for another development at 8 Union Square (three packages there: “Fashionista,” “Collector,” “Gourmet”—apparently a person has to be one of the three) believes in the detailed study of the client, for “the past is prologue; life is filled with clues.” He showed the signature lamps of his own design in the model’s guest room—large, empty glass jars out of which rise the lamps. “I call them ‘U Fill It.’”

Unfortunately, real people were moving in and out of the model apartments, and it was rumored that the real man sitting in the dining room with the Corcoran Sunshine salesperson was buying one of the apartments for his wife as a present. Like Topper, the ghosts should have pushed him out.

New York’s other empty rooms are not quite the live-across-from-the-McKim-Mead-White Met experience, with halls leading to rooms leading to halls, though the conversion of 823 Park with 12 full-floor homes may well be even grander. All one can see now are watery drawings on the Web site, which make the rooms look even more elegant: part of someone’s Bachelard dream of violets in childhood, trembling columns and wing chairs on a snowy night—perhaps for a middle-aged couple in French clothes with a preference for Straub and Huillet films.

Further east shines the Lucida, “clear and easy to understand,” said salesman Jared Randolph in the sales office on Lexington on East 85th Street. The Lucida’s imaginary inhabitants are not as fully formed, though they are apparently those who like to live inside of the sun, receive fresh piped air the way people do in Battery Park, stare at handbags in store windows (photos in the lobby) and gaze at “recyclable cork behind the concierge desk.” Mr. Randolph’s tour of the model in the sales office began with a horticultural lecture: “The hydrangea will bloom and then, once the hydrangea die, the ivy will be exposed.” Later, Mr. Randolph became a sky captain as he showed the flat-screen video of the upcoming apartment views. His favorite part of the tour is when he rings the doorbell and opens the door of the model apartment with lots of cream and bone and bathrooms reminiscent of the ones in the just-opened Trump Tower New Jersey booklet. It has a black cover—long and black like a liquor bottle—that feels greasy and gold pages and copy that speaks of Labrador polished granite or Latte and a bathroom with a shower with a tranquil rainfall feature but it doesn’t look like a rainfall, it looks like a nice but desultory, lonely bathroom.

The sunny pink-and-blue building at 246 West 17th has a model apartment and, of course, a companion book—they all do now—with drawings of imaginary families, the most prominent at 246 an interracial family and, of course, the mother is a psychologist wanting only goodness and reasonableness and for the children, too. All these tours in sales offices begin with the salesperson standing before a scale model. The world is a big, empty dollhouse. We’re all just trying to fill it.

Sheffield57’s “re-envisioned condos” at 322 West 57th should win a Nobel. Following are excerpts from the press release about the different apartments: “The Attorney,” who is “about power and sophistication” and has “embossed ostrich” and “shelves crafted in Macassar ebony.” He sounds rough but he likes the water, as evidenced by the white sailing photography. “The Fashion Shoe Designer” has “bright snakeskin pillows” and “glow-box nightstands.” No more need be said.

The “Elegant Woman Writer … ,” a lady of a certain age “with grown niece and faux tortoiseshell tables.” (But what about the Woman Who Is Screaming At Everybody on the Phone and Throwing Scouring Powder on her Pasta? Just what does that apartment look like? Is there a Persian carpet soaked with vermouth?)

Then there’s the new 21-story Gramercy going up on East 23rd Street (contracts for 70 percent reportedly went out the weekend after the office opened last week), the Michael Shvo and Philippe Starck extravaganza of a showroom with a rhinoceros head, and a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild, a bowl of green apples and Mr. Starck on flat screens flying around the city, for he is the ultimate fictional resident in his own designed interiors.

All these apartments have big art books or storybooks that expand the geography of the rooms that people are buying. If you bought at 141 Fifth (a sales office with flat file cabinet made upstate and a model apartment where the imaginary resident is reading Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico), you would believe that you are getting the Arch in Washington Square and a little girl holding loaves of bread.

For people who have the money and know the neighborhood, all this fiction is like the key chain the automotive dealer gives you, or the ballpoint pen with his name on it. But for the rest, they are terribly effective, containing somehow all the hope and promise of the 1964 World’s Fair.