Doom Scrolling? Meet Room Scrolling.

It's just as fraught, says columnist Markham Roberts, who opines on what we're missing in the swipe-and-like spaces flying by on our phones.

- BY Markham Roberts

IN THE EARLY 1990s, when I'd just begun working for Mark Hampton, he made me comb through his finely bound boxes of images he'd cut out from magazines over the years. They were in complete disorder and needed a gargantuan amount of sorting and reorganizing. What seemed like a gruesomely unfair punishment at the time was Mark's way of teaching me about the great designs of the past (while getting a crucial part of his office library cataloged).

It was a seminal learning experience, practically beaten into me, I say now with gratitude.

Going through all the images for weeks on end, I learned that the iconic apartment of Oscar and Annette de la Renta, which blew my mind, employed the same design element as did the fabulous Park Avenue apartment of Grace, Countess of Dudley (by Tom Parr): chic, double-sided bookcases to differentiate the spaces between sitting and dining rooms. This inspired me to do the same in a dining room for one of my very first clients once I went out on my own.

There is no way I could have studied these or made such a connection on my phone screen. Nor could I have noticed the way that the great Brunschwig & Fils Menars Border II fabric pattern was brilliantly used on all the furniture in Jayne Wrightsman's Palm Beach living room. I loved the way the pattern highlighted the forms of the upholstery.