For the rest, I managed to stick primarily with three dealers: the seriously gifted and generous Peter Patout, who knows more about American Empire and Louisiana Creole furniture than anyone I know; Allain Bush, whose eye, prices, and infinite patience make her the best bargain in town; and Patrick Dunne whose shop Lucullus is like a movie set. In one room you’re in a Parisian bistro; in another, a grand dining hall, in, say, a Norman castle. In the back there is Jeffrey Marchand, a framer of such uncommon creativity that I can’t stop buying maps and prints and photographs just so see what he’ll do to them.
---Fortunately, I did not have to go shopping to filly in my apartment in Manhattan. Unlike most Southerners I am not much into ancestor worship, but I am eternally grateful for the possessions of my immediate ancestors, not to mention the thoughtful timing of my grandfather, who had the good grace to die the same week I closed on my apartment. This was especially lucky since my furniture at that point consisted of the following: a Plexiglass coffee table with a cigarette burn; a Parsons table that in some other life I had proudly painted bright turquoise; a very heavy, extremely ungraceful, and surprisingly well traveled sofa that belonged to my friend Anne McGee’s aunt Fanny; and one good thing in the form of my mother’s cherry dining-room table, which I swiped form the Greenville, Mississippi, garden club, to which she donated it, along with some chairs upholstered in an unfortunate rust flame stitch.
---Everything but the table and chairs went, and my grandparents’ living room was transplanted into my own: The same lamps were on the same painted console tables that flanked the same Chinese Chippendale sofa on which the same throw pillows sat and above which the same portrait hung. (For years, no one in my family had a clue what the boy in the painting was holding. Torn between an oar or a butter churner, we did not find out if was a cricket bat until, several years ago, I went out with a cricket player, who was thoroughly bad news except for that piece of information.)