In the 1980s, Carolyne Roehm’s life was as close as anyone could come to one of the socialites in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Her second husband was Henry Kravis, a private-equity scion known for his leveraged buyout of Nabisco, and they lived in a $5.5 million Park Avenue apartment, furnished with Louis XV furniture and paintings by Renoir and Sargent. She had her own career, too; she had been an assistant, model, and muse to Oscar de la Renta, then left to found her own line. Post-divorce, she started teaching the rest of the world to live just as opulently as she did through coffee-table tomes on interiors and exteriors and, gift-wrapping, and floral design — which she studied from a master in France.

Many of her books were written in a Sutton Place duplex co-op that she found in 2004, a decade after her split from Kravis. She bought the place for $4.7 million from Marion Gilliam, a magazine publisher who now lives in Massachusetts. Gilliam says the apartment was owned by a relative of his wife, and he had ended up as the executor, overseeing it only for a short time. When Roehm arrived, she was thrilled to find she shared the tastes of the family and kept most of what she found: a double-high gallery entrance walled in limestone bricks that matched the building’s exterior, an oval dining room with a curved pocket door that closed off the kitchen, and a mahogany-paneled library with the feel of an enormous humidor.

But the real draw was a great room capped with a coffered ceiling and striped in neoclassical pilasters that reminded her of her home at Weatherstone, an 18th-century manor in rural Connecticut that Roehm had rebuilt after a fire. “The flavor was virtually identical,” she wrote in A Passion for Interiors. Both homes had double-height ceilings, which she had learned created a special feeling. “Though it may seem counterintuitive to say so, such rooms are like cocoons. You can see the whole world, it appears, through the windows, but feel cozy and protected in your big box.” The great room also had a practical use; it was big enough that she could spread proofs of her books over the carpet to see them as a single composition while portraits from her collection of 17th- and 18th-century figure painters stared down in judgment. (There’s a Reynolds, a Van Dyck, and several Vigée Le Bruns.)

The high-ceilinged great rooms of 322 East 57th Street were designed for the scale of paintings like these. The boutique 1929 co-op is one of the city’s studio buildings — more commonly found along West 67th Street — that were designed to be big and bright enough for an artist to work. Tamara de Lempicka rented here for almost 20 years, following the stuffier portrait painters Jere Wickwire and Douglas Chandor. As wealthy New Yorkers followed them, creatives kept coming: Andre Kostelanetz, the conductor who married the coloratura Lily Pons; Clay Felker, the founder of this magazine, and his wife, Gail Sheehy; the book collector John Fleming and, reportedly, the actor and director Orson Welles. (Still, the building is best known by the ground-floor tenant Mr Chow, where bow-tied waiters have been serving Peking duck since 1979.)

The high ceilings make apartments in the building feel airy and light, but Roehm’s feels even airier thanks to an unusual amount of storage space for a New York City apartment. A butler’s pantry is camouflaged with a panel that closes flush to the wall. Hallways are lined in deep closets with invisible doors that click open at a touch. “Everything’s sort of hidden,” said Charles Holmes, Roehm’s listing agent. “It’s very discreet.” Still, there wasn’t quite enough storage for Roehm’s particular needs. She turned a second bedroom into a dressing room with a wall of closets 20-inches deep. Much of the furniture drifted over from her previous apartment, at 1 Sutton Place, but she picked up knickknacks here and there. “That’s the fun of doing apartments and houses,” she said on a phone call from Weatherstone. “You’re always trying to improve it.”