\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Some people have housewarming parties the week they move in,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Mr. Dolby wrote in his e-mail invitation to friends.
\n
\n\t\t
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Others 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.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Mr. Dolby\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s home is theatrically and painstakingly decorated. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It reminds me of a Doris Day movie for some reason,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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.<\/p>\n
It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Miles had me paint the ceiling blue, too,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Mr. Dolby, referring to Miles Redd, his decorator. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Painting the ceiling the same color as the walls is one of his theories.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
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, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Trouble Boy\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Kensington Books), he shattered another myth: that all those cute gay Manhattan men in their 20\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s who go out to clubs and premieres every night are having a good time and great sex.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153People say I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m the gay Candace Bushnell,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said, referring to the author of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Sex and the City.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
In decorating his apartment, Mr. Dolby said he especially appreciated Mr. Redd\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s being open to all his suggestions. For instance, those striped walls in the foyer and the kitchen \u00e2\u20ac\u201d very uptown, very Dorothy Draper-ish \u00e2\u20ac\u201d were Mr. Dolby\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s idea.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153My friends make fun of them,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153But this was my first adult apartment, and a black-and-white foyer was my New York fantasy.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
His apartment may be many people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s quintessential New York fantasy. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I am really spoiled by that view,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I had been living in Los Angeles before, and I wanted space and light, and I was lucky to find what I wanted.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Tom Dolby said he inherited his interest in home design from his parents, who live in San Francisco: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153They are obsessive about details. They renovated their house for five years. The ironic thing is that we never had good sound systems.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Books, not music, are Mr. Dolby\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s obsession. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s always a selling point for a writer when a house has built-in bookshelves,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122art.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153You begin to remember what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a red book and what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an orange one,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said, making it clear he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hip to the paradox of a serious writer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s arranging novels by color. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153In my study, the books are organized by subject.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Mr. Dolby moved to New York, after graduating from Yale in 1998, to pursue the writer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 downtown guidebook called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153City Tripping New York,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and not coincidentally the protagonist of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Trouble Boy\u00e2\u20ac\u009d reviews nightclubs for a Web site that tanks.<\/p>\n
To write his coming-of-age novel, he believed he had to leave town and get some perspective.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I enrolled in the master\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s program at U.S.C. and moved to Los Angeles on September 10, 2001,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I wrote the book that year and realized I was not an L.A. person. I gave it my best shot. The dating scene was very difficult. All the guys were actors, and I just couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t relate. At the gym, I was the only person reading a book on the elliptical machines. Most people were reading screenplays.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
When he returned to New York, he found a community of writers at the Village Quill, a TriBeCa loft with work stations and WiFi, though his study at home, with its sunset views and snappy black-and-red bookshelves, is an enviable place to work. He explains that he likes to write new material at the Quill and work on revisions at home.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Then I spread out all over the apartment,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 he said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I pace and talk to myself and speak dialogue out loud.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Mr. Dolby is currently helping to edit an anthology called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: True Tales of Love, Lust and Friendship Between Straight Women and Gay Men,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which Dutton plans to publish next spring. He is also working on a second novel set at a New England boarding school.<\/p>\n
He confesses that he usually parks his laptop at the little cafe table in his kitchen. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I like the energy of that space,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It has the most light.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d From there, he can look down the galley kitchen to the river or survey the living room that Mr. Redd pulled together for him in his trademark preppies-gone-wild fashion.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The living room was painted white and very blah when I moved in,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Mr. Dolby said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Miles brought out the elegance of the space. Elegance is his thing.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
So are theatrical unveilings. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Miles does these installations,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Mr. Dolby explained. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153He sends you away, and he takes what you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got and finds what else you need. He brings in all this new furniture and sets up the room, and then you decide what you like and want to keep. It was weird to have my apartment empty and return to it full of furniture. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how I got the sofa, the zebra rug and Chinese chairs.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
He was torn about those sculptural wooden Chinese chairs, because although they look smart, they are not very comfortable.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Those chairs are for people you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really like,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Mr. Dolby said with a laugh. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I had to go out and buy two comfortable leather club chairs for reading and watching television.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Mr. Dolby said he hoped his apartment wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be a bachelor pad forever.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153When I settle down with someone and have a kid,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153it won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seem like so much space.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Next A<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Some people have housewarming parties the week they move in,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Mr. Dolby wrote in his e-mail invitation to friends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-furniture-world-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1387\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indonesia-furniture.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}