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.

When the couple first viewed the residence, in 2010, they had no way of knowing that music would be central to their lives there, as neither of them is a musician. Instead, they are both belletrists: Between them, they've written poetry, essays, and novels as well, as reported from war zones. (They both have books forthcoming: a memoir by Pinckney and a collection of classic essays on interior design edited by Fenton.) The house was designed by Boston architect Frank Hill Smith and built in 1890 for a founder of Arm & Hammer. Its aesthetic is a riff on the Lombardo Romanesque style, with a column of four oval rooms adjoining a five-story rectangle with an ornate arched Neo-Renaissance-style entryway. Ten thousand square feet, 18 rooms (including two kitchens), all of it wrapped in a rosy facade of thin Roman bricks.