Sometimes, as the old songs say, it feels as though the people you love don’t even know you exist. No matter how you persist. You can tell by their smile that they’re just your style and you think of them all the while but nothing, niente, no dice.

Of course, you do all you can to attract their attention. You buy a new gown, a new hat, a new face, but you just can’t make yourself seen or heard. The fruitless improvements you make to your personality!

Now admittedly, in some cases, the people you admire literally don’t know you exist. They live miles away, and you’ve never met. Your lives are utterly different and you’ve not a soul in common. And that is how it should be. And yet ...

I have become rather keen on a woman I read about in a book. She’s not a literary heroine of the old school with flowing locks and advanced morals. She’s neither governess nor amazon, Princeton poet or chorus girl. In fact, she’s not my usual type at all, yet she’s perfect in her way. Of me, sad to say, she knows not a thing.

I discovered her in that slightly oddly titled eight-kilo compendium Vogue Living: Houses Gardens People. I know more about her than a stranger should. I’ve seen a picture of her bathroom with its practically BC Carrara marble floor, and its art deco dressing table by Ruhlmann. I have, in fact, seen where she eats her breakfast and her triple-height drawing room and the interconnecting dining room which “is an intimate foil to its airy grandeur”.

Her name is Delphine and she’s a decorator. Her floors are of 18th-century French parquet. Her mantels are also French, and provincial and ancient. In fact, an army of craftspersons flocked from France to instal them, so her newly done Manhattan town house would look as though it had evolved through the centuries, in another continent, bravely and beautifully.

Wandering round our house I ask myself – sometimes gently, sometimes sternly – “What would Delphine do?” I even wonder where her visiting French craftspeople laid their heads at night. No doubt she would have solved the problem admirably, finding an exquisite vacant convent in which they’d make their temporary home. I imagine a long, dignified, dormitory like the one in the Madeline children’s books, with two neat lines of truckle beds, only in my scene there are Gauloises too and, possibly, late-night accordion life. These artisans glow with love for Delphine, who instinctively understands the point of everything they’ve ever tried to achieve. Her knowingness has a purity to it, for it is without compromise. Her faith in perfection is in itself perfect. She’s a poem.

Falling asleep I sometimes trill a song of my own composition: “Delphine, Delphine, Is your 18th-century parquet compatible with underfloor heatine?”

. . .

In a sort of low-effort homage to Delphine, I track down a company near Arles that grows and cuts down its own trees and then mills them in its own mill into chevron-shaped batons for your delight and delectation. On its website you can see a room with a nasty carpet transformed into a gracious dwelling by a small Gallic team. I get a quote from these people. It’s impressively high but they regret they cannot spare their own men to do the job. They are in demand. Delphine might have insisted, but I am not Delphine. There may be two or three things that I can do that she cannot, but, let’s be frank, I doubt it. I must come clean at this juncture and beg to state that I do not share Delpine’s affection for grey alligator-skin upholstery, but no one likes their heroes without flaws. Ennobling and forgiving have always gone hand in hand. Besides, one mustn’t be inflexible.

I call my friend Marc, who is a New York interior designer in demand. He chats to me from a sort of playground for dogs, a pooch paradise, where he’s running around with his three small “boys”. Happy yaps obscure the connection. It’s a midweek morning. “Business is slow,” he speaks gravely, “although if I were a billionaire, this is exactly where I’d come, so maybe it’s not so bad!” He cheers himself up in the space of one 21-word sentence. High morale is recession-proof, perhaps.

“Is there a word, in American, for when a person has a bit of a crush on a decorator?” I ask him.

“Yes,” he replies. “It’s ‘Hooray’!”

susie.boyt@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/boyt