Social Study

In the Harlem townhouse they lovingly restored, an intellectual couple has created a dramatic environment for entertaining their friends and neighbors.

- By Kate Bolick. Photographs by Stephen Kent Johnson

An English desk anchors a library dedicated to books on the decorative arts. Decorative wall painting by Jane Warrick; artworks by Claude Mellan (left) and Jacques Callot (right). For details, see Resources.

The living room of James Fenton and Darryl Pinckney's 1890s Harlem townhouse, which was designed in the Neo-Renaissance style by Frank Hill Smith and renovated by the couple with architect Samuel G. White. Regency mirror by Thomas Fentham; walls in Benjamin Moore's Sunshine.

The musical and literary salons that the British poet James Fenton and the American writer Darryl Pinckney host in their Harlem townhouse are a delight not only for their guests, but also for passersby. Temperatures willing, they throw open the wide-paned windows so that the gentle strains of a Chopin sonata can sound out from two grand Steinway pianos in their living room.