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.

“I would have to agree about the peony,” said Reed McIlvaine of Renny & Reed on Park Avenue, while setting up a party for the Drawing Center at Tribeca Rooftop. “They are just about my favorite.” As for Meredith Waga Perez, co-owner of the Belle Fleur studio on Fifth Avenue: “No matter how many peonies I bring in, I sell out every single day,” she said. “Peonies are a New York favorite, and it just gets stronger and stronger. I think they’re very sexy. The red charm peony, when the petals start to fall, they don’t wilt or bruise; the petals will just fall off.” They will not remind New Yorkers of the ups and downs of life and death.

The cool, fluffy peony, so Mrs. Dalloway, is especially perfect for women moving about in this season’s fragile, tissue-thin flowered dresses. The women in them will look wonderful holding peonies in their arms. It would be hard to imagine them holding water-retaining succulents that feel like the touch of a reptile: all fleshy green, mauve and brown, sitting in a pile of black river rocks, all of which looks like it’s in the garden of the Alligator People. “I am so over them,” said Raquel Corvino, a designer based in West Chelsea, of succulents. Ms. Corvino, who creates arrangements for Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s restaurants and for André Balazs, to whom she recently suggested sending people a towering cherry blossom in a single vase, said:

“Succulents don’t change. It takes so long for them to bloom. There’s nothing more modern than representing what is traditional—the lilac, the scent in the air.” One does hope there will be a backlash soon against spare floral arrangements, which tend to make homes look like hotels and nightclubs.

“I have clients who don’t want another Zen-like experience,” said New York City landscape designer Mario Nievera. “Now people want more detail.” What detail? “Whatever is opposed to nothing.” What is nothing? “Stainless steel, stone and pebbles.”

“Whatever is classical that we got from our grandmother—you can’t do better than that,” said Olivier Giugni, who had a cold (a setback in the flower-sniffing profession), speaking from his L’Olivier Floral Atelier on West 14th Street, which has a Moroccan garden. “Every year, they come up with a new variety of flower,” added Mr. Giugni, who is from the South of France. “There is nothing better than the rose—now they do roses with four colors. Very weird.” (Though there is also a “bloody” red rose with sparkling gold, silver or black along the top of the petal, and he said he liked that.)

Regarding a return to the romantic, Mr. Giugni said: “The romantic bouquet is an English bouquet, in the mind of the people. It is a mixture of lilac and peony, like you find in an English garden. For me, that is not romantic. One kind of flower in one vase, extremely clean, is romantic. The one flower could be anything—peony, frescia—as long as it is very clean.”

One or many, flowers are getting fatter, which means there is more to crush one’s face in. Renny & Reed have coral peonies six inches in diameter. The mad scientists are growing reniculous (another favorite of the lush set, as it is rose-like) as big as oranges, with hundreds of petals. Bigger is just a trend all around. “Six-foot-tall roses are coming up from Ecuador,” said Amy Stewart, whose Flower Confidential was just published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. “They have freakishly long stems.” Taller than a human. “Big roses are really getting people’s attention,” Mr. Giugni said. “But huge roses look like cauliflowers. That is not very romantic.”

All kinds of flowers are now coming into New York City more months of the year. They fly in by airplane from Europe, South America, California. A person could get a peony in January when it arrives from New Zealand.

“They are putting money into making a sturdier flower, more durable for travel—one that lasts longer in a vase, that doesn’t drop petals or shed pollen,” Ms. Stewart said. “Now these new varieties are being bred to open into this sort of half-open shape before they’re harvested. This way, flowers will last as long as if you bought them in the bud stage. As humans live longer, so are cut flowers.” We are all just going to go on forever in this eternal hell.

“People think flowers are supposed to last two weeks—what the hell is that?” asked the Brazilian born Zezé, in his shop on First Avenue at 52nd Street with the stone statue of Bacchus. “Flowers is the moment you receive them, the moment you never forget. After two, three days, who cares?” He then showed a Zagat mention about how his orchids “last longer than most.” Like art, writing, food, the whole matter of flowers is about not wanting to disappoint.

All those in the flower industry agreed on one thing: It is spring, and business is good. “Love is in the air,” said Peggy O’Shea, co-owner of Zezé. At night, a man on the corner outside the deli was cutting the stems, putting plastic holders on the bottom. There was no music, no sirens, only the sounds of spring arriving in full taffeta—rustle, rustle. The curtain blows a bit in the breeze and you know it’s going to happen. Even the airplane sounded like it wanted something.

At Fisher & Page Ltd. at 5:30 a.m., in the flower market on 28th Street between Sixth and Seventh, a crowd of open roses was waiting shoulder-to-shoulder in boxes. They were all eager with that gang mentality: soldiers for deployment, slap each other’s hands, let’s get to that Sloan Kettering benefit. “The older roses, people use for party work,” said supervisor Chris Demeo, supervising the men in sweatshirts stacking flowers wrapped in white paper on metal shelves. One man was walking on the sidewalk, hidden behind large palmetto leaves.

The market is not what it used to be. (Though Marc-Antoine, born in Lille, France, was spotted in the early-morning cold in a black leather jacket, choosing exactly the right purple delphium to bring to Van Cleef & Arpels, where he supplies the flowers for the desk twice a week.) “It’s strange the last few years how quiet it’s been,” said Mr. Davis of Elan. “Years ago, you could get there at 3 in the morning and it was bustling. If you don’t get there after 5, they wouldn’t have the boxes open.”

Blame the Internet, again. “There is not that need to come to one place every day,” Ms. Stewart said, though all the florists assure they are presences at the market. “If I’m sending flowers to Anna Wintour, I pick them myself,” said Ms. Waga Perez, sitting in the pale blue room where her mother talks with the brides.

Is the orchid going by the by? It always brings to mind the West Elm store in Dumbo with the lilac pillows. “The orchid, I’m really over,” Ms. Corvino said. “I use them because I have to. They’re so practical. They need no water or
light, and that is amazing for a flower.” Others continued to cheer this erstwhile exotic. “There are so many cheap orchids coming in from Thailand … Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines,” said Ms. Stewart. “The nice thing about tropicals: They don’t have to be refrigerated a lot.”

“See that Phalaenopsis?” said Mauro Gomes of Magnolia on Hudson, who had many tall, elegant examples. “There’s a Leucadendron.” All these florists speak in Greek. What are you saying? May I just have the purple one?

At the New York Botanical Garden on April 26, the Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury, eightysomething, had come in for the ribbon-cutting of her newly designed Auricula Theater, created in the tradition of the 17th-century ones made to protect primroses from stormy weather. Later, Lady Salisbury signed her book, The Gardens at Hatfield, at the nearby cocktail party in the Antique Garden Furniture Show, where the women looked like flowers—one in dull shocking-pink satin, another on crutches; one in pale green, who said, “Look at that bird!” while a man with a ponytail moved a shrub on his knees. The dowager herself, fetching in a thin black-and-white polka-dot dress and black grosgrain hair ribbon with the eyes of an early film star, looked up and said, “I believe …. ” We all waited breathlessly. For in addition to marrying the sixth Lord Salisbury and having seven children, she has designed gardens for the Prince of Wales, and then of course those at her former home, the Jacobean palace of Hatfield, with baroque topiaries, an Elizabethan-style knot garden and Georgian-inspired heraldic parterres.

“It is very difficult to say,” Lady Salisbury said. “It depends on what’s in the garden at the moment.”

At a preview the other day of the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club Decorator Show House, Ms. Imperioli was standing in a shiny black vinyl coat near the “La Dolce Vita” sitting/music room that she had created for the occasion. It immediately brought to mind Napoleon and the first French Empire style, with the medallions, laurel wreaths, furniture mounts and murmurings of ancient Imperial Rome, and also thoughts of Malmaison and Napoleon’s divorce from Josephine, who adored roses (he thought she spent too much on the house). Ms. Imperioli’s deeply red room pressed down heavily on the lungs but was startlingly apart from Kips Bay’s other rooms: Amy Lau’s pastel and watery California colors and David Barrett’s pink-and-purply-flowered “Cocktails in a Townhouse Potting Shed,” which smelled vaguely of soil and vodka. Often theatrically named, these rooms all have a bit of a narrative: one with a glass snake, another with a letter opener for murder, and—the staple these days—in the frozen still life of the artificial displays, flat-screen TVs, as in the Jed Johnson bedroom, with the film clips of women screaming at and hitting men, including Barbra Streisand throwing something: “You son of a bitch.”

Ms. Imperioli’s aesthetic of painted screens, braid, heavily draped windows when there are windows, and much cosseting and carpeting—all of which could be summed up as Lotte Lenya singing in a Fornasetti chair with hands tied to the arms—extends to all the Imperioli environments: their three-and-a-half-year-old theater, Studio Dante, on West 29th; their gutted former-factory-building townhouse in Tribeca, now rehabbed into a palazzo with an Aubusson rug and a bronze of Antinous; and, in past years, to Ciel Rouge, the very red and French Old World–looking bar they owned in Chelsea.

During an interview with Ms. Imperioli in the 66-seat theater—which is next to a car park but looks like a French Russian palace inside, and where they perform neorealist dramas (one set in the Bronx, and featuring a rooster)—she talked of how she and Mr. Imperioli married five months after they met 11 years ago in a bar. Which bar? “It’s too personal to say the name,” she said, sitting on a velvet banquette along the theater lobby wall—as in the Imperiolis’ home, banquettes are up against the walls, an imperial-court aesthetic. (But then courts are theaters, with large public spaces for bestowing knighthood and so on.) Ms. Imperioli also discussed her beliefs, such as: “I like ornate, but my ornate is very strict.” And: “Interior decorators are mostly personal shoppers.”

Her husband was elsewhere, either filming the last of the Sopranos episodes, or preparing for upcoming independent films in Portugal and Iceland, or surveying their latest purchase, a five-story walkup at 499 Canal Street that, as reported by The Observer, the couple just bought for $2.4 million to house the expanding theater offices. When Mr. Imperioli called once, she said, “I’ll be there soon, Poopy”—or maybe she said “Poppy.”

Mr. Imperioli grew up in Mt. Vernon, N.Y., where his father was a bus driver. When he was asked on the phone if his wife’s aesthetic was familiar to him, he replied, “No—that’s Victoria.”

Ms. Imperioli went on about how, for their anniversary, they “love the Plaza Athénée—the furnishings, of course. I call myself the Uffizi Gallery.” Then she went on to discuss Dante, as in the name of the couple’s theater and the bust in the lobby. “Florence was his true love,” she said. “He was in exile 28 years. He loved Florence like a man loves a woman.”

Ms. Imperioli’s vision must have taken seed somehow in the Ukraine, where she was born—the Russians were obsessed with the French in the 19th century—and then flowered after coming to New York City with her mother, who works in real estate, she said. She left home at age 16 and studied philosophy and art at the School of Visual Arts. “I remember living in a crappy railroad apartment,” she said. “I painted it. The floor was black; the fireplace and moldings were white; the walls were gray. It was monochromatic, yes—but nice.”

Mrs. Imperioli takes hold of a situation, a place, and makes it hers like a military campaign (though no Russian winter will destroy her). “I basically take everything apart and redo it,” she said. The houses, the gutting, the rebuilding, the upholstery, her stepfather from Poland, Ryczard Chlebowski, as her first officer, and the Imperioli children—Isabella, 16 (from a previous relationship of Victoria’s), Vadim, 9½, David, 5½. “We incorporate them here, in the theater. In the summer, I take off two months. I take the kids to our condo in Florida. I tutor them in the summer. What we do with the kids, we travel a lot. We went to Italy for Christmas and New Year. We had a tour guide with us. We went to Villa Adriatica, where the children could see the barracks, where the soldiers’ rooms had beautiful mosaics. Every single floor in every room was different—not a single repeat.”

She continued: “I love to build more than I love to buy.” (More on “decorators as personal shoppers today.”) Down to the theater basement: “This is my real big saw. We have all kind of big-boy tools down here. We could actually build anything.” Ms. Imperioli was talking about her stepfather. Mr. Imperioli, on the phone, said: “I am very terrible at carpentry.” He excels in other areas. In addition to playing Tony Soprano’s nephew Christopher, he has acted in more than 30 films, written five Sopranos episodes, and co-authored the brilliant Spike Lee Summer of Sam film. “I wrote that when I was still poor,” he said.

Back to the tools: “There is such a tendency to do things on the cheap,” Ms. Imperioli said. “I abhor that. I have to have architecture in the space—a good floor, a nice ceiling, a sense of differentiation. The modernist tendency is economically based.” What about Corbusier and others? “Yes, well, modern classicism. Sparseness is not an aesthetic now. We tend to make everything from plastic and glass.” Are her interior-design clients all Empire enthusiasts? She wouldn’t reveal her clients, though her Web site shows some contemporary pieces mixed in with the Empire stuff. She said that her time is more taken up with the theater.

At first look, the cost of such upholstery—the silk, the seeming inlay—would be astronomical. A closer look revealed not gold inlay on the theater’s creamy lobby ceiling, but rather thin gold ribbon precisely applied in a cross pattern. “I used thousands of yards of ribbons,” Ms. Imperioli said. The medallions, rosettes, were painted with gilt. “You can get them anywhere,” she said. “Yes, Home Depot.”

“My father and I do 80 percent of the work. I did send out for feather cushions,” she said, looking down at a settee. The 50-some cream-colored silk-damask Louis XVI chairs for the audience members? “They’re reproductions. I bought them from a dealer. They’re clearly not antique chairs. They wouldn’t hold the 500-pound people in America.”

Their theater—which is so Méliés’ Magic Theater inside, or else 19th-century Russia—presents work (currently about three plays a year) set in convenience stores, bubble rooms, off-track betting parlors. Ms. Imperioli is nonchalant about the
incongruity. “When people come to a beautiful environment, they expect more. Somebody will put a piece of gum on the molding,” she said, indicating a piece of gum on the molding.

“All of our plays have some kind of social commentary,” she continued. “You have to be responsible to your audience. We don’t entertain; we don’t do musicals. We do plays of serious nature. We deal with a lot of dark, heavy matters.”

“We’re not opposed to doing something not realistic,” Mr. Imperioli said on the phone. “We’re interested in new plays. They don’t have to be set in modern times—we’re open. Maybe we’ll do something with a palace in it.”

“Sitting at their table,” my friend shuddered, “feels dangerous.”

The in-laws’ sofa is the Boa model, by Edra, an Italian company, and it looks like a nest of soft snakes piled on the ground. “It’s impossible to conduct any kind of formal or even informal interview on it, or even drink a cup of tea,” my friend reported, “and if a high-school date came in to meet the parents, it could pose problems. How do you sit in it? Or get up?”

As New York’s design cognoscenti trundle off to Milan for the annual Salone di Mobile (a.k.a. the Chair Fair), and as Berlin prepares for a highly anticipated art exhibition on pain (Schmerz), is it a coincidence that much of today’s au courant furniture looks masterminded by someone who really, really hates it when their guests stay too long?

At the Soho store Moss, Dutch daredevil designer Maarten Baas has done a charred version of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s famous, puritanically rigid Argyle chair for $12,000, part of the store’s new “Extreme Seating” category. At Phurniture on Bond Street, a crushed-aluminum Shlomo Harush chair recently sold to a Manhattan couple for $15,000 (Dolce & Gabbana bought several others).

Such “art furniture” attempts to collapse the borders between art and design, which means functionality can sometimes get short shrift. “It’s not supposed to be comfortable,” snapped my friend’s father-in-law, while shopping for a sofa even more punishing than the Boa. “It’s art.”

Take the Sweetheart Chair, by Forrest Myers, a Williamsburg artist—or maybe pull it out for a much-despised ex instead: It looks like a old-fashioned ice-cream-parlor chair that’s had its seat cushion ripped off and survived a nuclear holocaust. “That piece is really more sculpture,” said Barry Friedman, Mr. Myers’ dealer and one of the leading figures in the contemporary art-furniture world. “This is very, very high-quality stuff. Museums collect it.”

Mr. Friedman took another of Mr. Myers’ chairs, the Parker, to Design Miami, the design show at Art Basel Miami. This chair, at one point  named the Aviary, resembles a human-sized bird’s nest—if a bird’s nest were shaped like an easy chair and the twigs were skin-pinching steel wires. “It’s not an implement of destruction,” said Mr. Friedman, who had to perch on the Parker during the show because of a health problem that kept him from standing for long periods. “If I had a three-and-a-half-hour movie to watch and I had to choose between that and a sofa, I’d choose a sofa,” he admitted. “But it wasn’t so bad.”

Mr. Myers, part of the 1970’s and early-80’s avant-garde, works in a Williamsburg loft across the street from The Future Perfect, a brave young home store that sells daring, difficult work by several new-wave designer-artists. Mr. Friedman, along with his young partner, Marc Benda, is planning to move his uptown gallery to an 18,000-square-foot space in Chelsea, the ground floor of which will be partially devoted to art furniture.

The Benda-Friedman space is near Larry Gagosian’s downtown gallery, where Aussie design darling Marc Newson had a solo exhibit earlier this year, featuring one-of-a-kind seating in marble—not the most yielding substance, but it does cunningly suggest unaffordable luxury-condo kitchen-counter sex fantasies and Caligula’s orgies. (The Romans didn’t need chair backs!) People bought it: Even with item prices in the six figures, the show came close to selling out.

Mr. Newson’s most famous piece, Lockheed Lounge, made in an edition of 10 in 1985, can be viewed around the corner at Sebastian + Barquet: a rounded hollow chaise constructed of patchwork airplane metal, with a ladylike single club foot at the front. The unpretentious Mexican dealer Ramis Barquet might even let you have a test lie-down. Freud surely would’ve liked to place his more windbaggy clients on it.

“No, you would not sit on it for very long,” said Mr. Barquet, but the chair brings him immense pleasure. He got it for $950,000 at Sotheby’s in spring 2006, the most ever paid for a contemporary furniture piece.  (In 2000, a Lockheed Lounge sold for $105,000. If only you’d known then that you wanted a chaise that would double as a block on which to practice karate chops so you could be like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill II!) “You would spend millions for an important painting,” Mr. Barquet said. “I got a deal.”

He also noted a practical point of the Lockheed: “It’s metal, so it’s cool in the summer.”

Meanwhile, Joris Laarman, a rising Dutch designer, has created a fantastically beautiful—and potentially perilous—radiator of curlicues that creep up your wall, as well as the less exuberant Freedom of Beech: a backless chair that consists of a seat-level plank with two front legs and two back legs that extend beyond the seat to shoulder height but have nothing between them. Excellent for yoga back bends! Mr. Laarman isn’t interested in “the luxury of comfortable living,” he wrote on his Web site, but “with the luxury of uncertainty and imagination.”

Such a philosophy makes perfect sense to the director and designer Robert Wilson—“I have many chairs and seldom sit on any of them,” he remarked in an e-mail—and to the Miami- and New York–based real-estate developer and collector Craig Robins. “For some people, looking at something beautiful and important does something to their psyche that’s more important than comfort,” Mr. Robins said. “Sitting surrounded by radical design that’s beautiful and important makes me feel much better than staying in some fake decorator lobby in some five-star hotel chain that says, ‘I paid a lot of money to be here.’”

Mr. Robins conceded that when his children were toddlers, he put his more aggressive collectibles in storage. “Some of it was dangerous,” he said. But now that they’re in grade school, he’s shifted toward the metal and Corian, favoring Zaha Hadids, Ron Arads and Newsons.

According to Ken Ames, a professor at the Bard Graduate School of Design, challenging chairs are nothing new. “Furniture was originally about power and prestige,” he said. “Comfort only comes into play in the 18th century, probably in France, and carries on through the Victorian era with the rise of upholstery.”

Though his colleague, Pat Kirkham, believes the desire for comfort is ancient. “One assumes the Egyptians were after it,” she said. “Some of their stools have contours to cradle each buttock.”

Avant-garde furniture’s reputation for sadism was cemented with the Bauhaus’ mania for sharp angles and metal tubing. By the 1950’s, people were crying out against the modernist project, begging for a little cosseting (hence Eames’ famous 1956 padded lounge chair, not to mention a generation of suburban Barcaloungers). Even now, many hotels advertise themselves with phrases like �
��the perfect blend of modern and comfortable,” as though the two are opposed.

Comfortable furniture can be not only bourgeois, but also sinister. In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the susceptible young hero Hans Castorp first begins to fall prey to the indolent, lust-ridden world of the Swiss Alps sanatorium after reposing in one of the chairs created for the rest cures, “which had almost mysterious properties [he] found difficult to analyze …. It was terribly pleasant just to lie there … he could not remember ever having used a more comfortable lounge chair.” Castorp ends up leaving the world of progress for seven years in favor of illness and perversion.

“What is comfort, really?” asked Constantine Boym, the witty Russian genius behind miniature touristy sculptures of edifices like the World Trade Center and the New Orleans Superdome.

For the Soho store Moss’ booth in Miami, Mr. Boym custom-made one-off “Art Furniture”: stretching ready-made replicas of Renaissance paintings over wooden frames. “The form-follows-function formula was pronounced in the early 20th century,” he said. “Ninety years have passed; it’s been absorbed by design culture, and people have moved on. It’s exciting to sit on a chair that has a different sensation. When you go to a restaurant, you don’t always order brisket or another comfort food. Sometimes you order escargot or steak tartare.”

In the living room of his Lower East Side apartment, Mr. Boym excites guests with two Strap chairs made from polypropylene bands. “Probably not the most comfortable, especially if you’re in a short skirt, but it’s O.K., it’s interesting,” he said. “Comfort is psychological. If you have a pretty girl on your lap, any chair would be the most comfortable in the world.”

Toni Schlesinger is on vacation.

April 14 is the time to commemorate with thoughts of the sea. (Especially because I am on a ship right now, sailing from Oman to Egypt and beyond.) Not only are cruising enthusiasts starting younger and long before retirement, but New York City’s cruise industry is booming with the 30-year master plan, according to the Economic Development Corporation. Approximately 1.7 million passengers are expected to pass through the city in 2010, up from 845,000 in 2004. At the new Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in Red Hook, 225,000 passengers are expected in 2007.

Of course, New York City’s terminal commotion will never again be like the postwar 1950’s, when cruising as a holiday reached its peak, with more than 60 passenger ships a day coming and going from the Hudson River docks: confetti and “Darling, you must come with us and leave dreary Manhattan behind, and there are sooo many interesting people in the other countries, with their shoes that turn up at the toes.”

Sadly, the ships (even the grandest lines: Regent, Crystal, Seabourn, Silversea) have stripped down—a tale often told, but let us go over it again. No more Pompeian baths, portraits of the Sun King, feudal banquet halls or the de rigueur Moorish room, with carpets and a man in a hat and embroidered robe making little cups of coffee—though the Regent Voyager’s specially themed “1,001 Arabian Nights” dining room the other night wasn’t so far afield, with its burlap palm tree, aromatic lobster skewers and rose-water sherbet, and a belly dancer from Epcot Center in purple chiffon and then orange chiffon for her special number, “Aisha.” The crowd went wild. According to the ship’s regulars, people who take the four-month World Cruise every year, Aisha used to be a flamenco dancer. Men from New Jersey were dressed as oil sheiks for the evening, hanging around the papier-mâché camel. The West is angry at the Middle East.

Passenger A. has been on 37 world cruises, played bridge with Omar Sharif and ate at Lutèce “all black and blue” after she had plastic surgery in the 1980’s. “The Sagafjord—that was a ship! And the parties!” she said. “There was a pumpkin coach made by the ship’s carpenters. We had to learn the gavotte. We wore ball gowns, beading by Richelieu. Not like the slobs today.” The Sagafjord burned in 1996 from an engine fire, and it drifted for days on the South China Sea. These ships, so festive with hilarity, often have sad ends. The France, 1912, was laid up after the Great Depression and sold to ship wreckers. The Statendam, 1929, destroyed during the Nazi invasion of Rotterdam, burned for days; her twisted remains were later scrapped. Then, of course, the Titanic’s silk walls and Adams paneling. And now the Sea Diamond.

The architectural plan of cruise ships hasn’t evolved much since those days. There is still the grand stairway to the dining room for Mrs. Clockus to sweep down in the polyester caftan she bought in Salamah because her luggage was lost. There is still the same top deck with the same officers in white smiling at the women at lunch and making them feel valued. And, of course, the entire layout is not far from the bluish Kodachrome of late 1970’s Love Boat television shows, with people with fruit drinks around a small, kidney-shaped pool, bouncing up and down when they dance, scarf tops. The ship’s doctor is waiting for Sherry Bolero, whom he met during a former cruise, and she comes on wearing a plum beret with feather quills, and someone says, “Hel-lo, Evelyn,” and another person says, “Will you excuse me, please?”, and there is always someone ordering a double bourbon—6,000 bottles a month (wine and hard liquor) are consumed by 550 people (on the Regent Voyager cruise, which lasts four months). The ship experience is so liquid—the ocean, the drinks, the tears of joy or sorrow, depending.

Thankfully, unlike Love Boat, there is no obnoxious little boy saying, “I’m going to change things” and get his divorced parents back together, a sort of 1970’s preoccupation, though no one would bother today. Many of the people who go on world cruises together aren’t even married, because they don’t want to complicate their vast holdings later in life.

The Internet café, full of black Samsungs and wood veneer, has replaced the grand ballroom. The cafés get bigger on ships every year, and everyone’s crying “Marco, Marco!” to the tech guy. It is like he is running a nursery with babies crying and he has to calm down the passengers with his French accent: “Reception is difficult in the Red Sea. It will get better when we get to the Mediterranean.” Many former titans of industry are only learning to e-mail at 80. They stare down at their large hands on the keys. “My wife told me that …. ” The photo downloads are too much for everyone. “Where did my captions go?”

There are two windows in the Internet café. They are not even shaped like portholes, the way they are in the Maritime Hotel in Chelsea, where you can wrap yourself in white terrycloth and stare out at the water and drink a bottle of something. People occasionally turn from their computer screens, aquariums in their own way, and glance at the sea passing by to the left.

Centuries ago, people were phobic about the ocean, according to The Ocean at Home. People knew only of paintings of shipwrecks, and sailors’ stories of sea monsters. The ocean was a “treacherous, cursed, and lonely place.” Then came the enthusiastic naturalists, railways taking people to the seaside, where they discovered the healing powers of saltwater and sniffed the ocean air. Then the diving bells, for observing the creatures with arms and eyes on top of their heads.

Ships are for people who want to cut away, lose the shame, cut the rope of a dull or unhappy past, disappear into the night: The ship leaves for Cuba at midnight—be on it. They seek the adventure, but those who do it a lot prefer the same ship, the same breakfast table, the same pale yellow linen, the same waiter, the same eating companions. Gladys, formerly from Manhattan, said: “Some of us have been together at least 25 years”—from Royal Viking to Seabourn to Regent Voyager. The closeness leads to dust-ups, like at lunch when X snapped at Y and Z said, “Are you having another martini?” Concentrate character in one place for more drama. During pre-dinner drinking at Observation, as Frankie, the guitarist who is Aisha’s father, played “Begin the Beguine,” a woman walked by and three onlookers said in chorus: “There she is—the kleptomaniac. They barred her from the ship. Now she’s back under a different name.”

Is there truly still danger and adventure on these ships, so insulated from the water with all the bedrooms, couches and chairs that they are like condominium towers on their sides floating over the octopus, the anemones, the porpoises? My aunt, 30 cruises later, recalled the 40-foot tidal wave in the Pacific that sent her rolling across the nightclub floor with the piano. Then when the Royal Viking Sun crashed into Egypt’s coral reef—a national treasure—she had to sleep in the dining room with her head on the table. All the passengers were evacuated; Cunard had to pay $23.5 million in damages; and the captain had to take the fall, as captains do, even though he wasn’t supposed to be on duty. But now he is the captain of the ResidenSea, the cruise ship in which people own apartments and forever is truly forever, as long as the water holds up, though actually the ship could be beached and still go on.