Habitats | West Village

Decorated in Technicolor

Photographs by Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times CHANNELING DOROTHY DRAPERThe striped walls in the kitchen and the foyer are a nod to Dorothy Draper, the New York decorator known for her theatrical interiors of the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s.
By DAN SHAW Published: July 23, 2006 A COUPLE of weeks ago, more than two years after moving into his West Village apartment, Tom Dolby gave his first big party.
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Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times EVOKING ANOTHER ERA Tom Dolby says of his apartment, “It reminds me of a Doris Day movie for some reason.” mmkey.net
“Some people have housewarming parties the week they move in,” Mr. Dolby wrote in his e-mail invitation to friends. “Others like to wait until every last room has been wallpapered, light fixture has been replaced, and piece of furniture has been selected. As most of you know, I fall into the latter category.”
Mr. Dolby’s home is theatrically and painstakingly decorated. “It reminds me of a Doris Day movie for some reason,” said Mr. Dolby, a 31-year-old novelist who has the low-key charm and winning good looks of a latter-day out-of-the-closet Rock Hudson.
It’s easy to imagine Doris and Rock necking here. The apartment evokes a bygone era when women wore gloves and men wore hats and they could always find Checker cabs in the rain. From the jazzy black-and-white striped wallpaper in the foyer to the suave grass-cloth walls in the study to the optimistic powder-blue living room, the apartment seems rendered in Technicolor.
“Miles had me paint the ceiling blue, too,” said Mr. Dolby, referring to Miles Redd, his decorator. “Painting the ceiling the same color as the walls is one of his theories.”

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Mr. Dolby is happy to admit that he worked with a decorator and to shatter the myth that all gay men are born with pitch-perfect taste. In his 2004 debut novel, “The Trouble Boy” (Kensington Books), he shattered another myth: that all those cute gay Manhattan men in their 20’s who go out to clubs and premieres every night are having a good time and great sex.
“People say I’m the gay Candace Bushnell,” he said, referring to the author of “Sex and the City.”
In decorating his apartment, Mr. Dolby said he especially appreciated Mr. Redd’s being open to all his suggestions. For instance, those striped walls in the foyer and the kitchen — very uptown, very Dorothy Draper-ish — were Mr. Dolby’s idea.
“My friends make fun of them,” he said. “But this was my first adult apartment, and a black-and-white foyer was my New York fantasy.”
His apartment may be many people’s quintessential New York fantasy. It’s a 1,200-square-foot corner apartment in a classic 1931 doorman building, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a sunken living room with a wood-burning fireplace, a windowed kitchen and unobstructed views of Lower Manhattan, the Hudson River and New Jersey. 英语文摘
“I am really spoiled by that view,” he said. “I had been living in Los Angeles before, and I wanted space and light, and I was lucky to find what I wanted.”
Mr. Dolby was born lucky. His father, Ray, is the founder of Dolby Laboratories, the pioneering audio company that went public last year, and he helped his son buy the apartment for $1.5 million three years ago.
Tom Dolby said he inherited his interest in home design from his parents, who live in San Francisco: “They are obsessive about details. They renovated their house for five years. The ironic thing is that we never had good sound systems.”
Books, not music, are Mr. Dolby’s obsession. “It’s always a selling point for a writer when a house has built-in bookshelves,” he said, pointing to the original bookcases in the living room. He has organized the volumes by the color of their spines so they look like objets d’art.
“You begin to remember what’s a red book and what’s an orange one,” he said, making it clear he’s hip to the paradox of a serious writer’s arranging novels by color. “In my study, the books are organized by subject.”

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Mr. Dolby moved to New York, after graduating from Yale in 1998, to pursue the writer’s life during the dot-com boom. He lived on lower Fifth Avenue and was a founder of citytripping.com, a short-lived Web site. He did publish a downto
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