From Useful to Beautiful: A Decorative Arts Tour

The Mount Vernon Hotel Museum keeps a set of period rooms from 1826, and a guide walks you through them for the length of the lunch hour. The theme follows how a plain useful object, a teapot, a chair, a writing box, slowly earned its ornament. The decorative arts here were made to be handled, not only admired. Along the way you pass historic letters and portraits tied to John Adams and George Washington.

I read a room by its lines first, the curve of a chair back, the taper of a candlestick, the weight of a drawn curtain. This tour hands those details over slowly, one room at a time, with room to look. A single teapot can hold a whole afternoon of drawing. The garden by the Queensboro Bridge makes a quiet last page, green brick and old iron overhead.

The tour runs Thursday from noon to half past one, on East 61st Street a few blocks from the Lexington Avenue trains. Book the guided slot ahead. The rooms are small and the group stays close, room by room. Admission covers the whole tour, with no separate ticket for the guide. Pack a sketchbook and one pencil, and the garden bench outside costs nothing at all.