The latest issue of House & Garden is New York City focused. There's lots of peeking into the homes of the rich and shameless, which is always fun. In fact, the cover story features Gwyneth Paltrow and her new home in the Hamptons. The hook--she picked out much of her furniture ALL BY HERSELF.

Though this is easy to poke fun at, if I had that kind of money, I'd hire my very talented friend Renee Turman to be my interior decorator. Even though I design gardens, I love the collaborative process and the ways ideas collide and coalesce between the designer and the client to shape spaces. As well, the benefit of working with a garden designer and an interior designer is that you create an entire plan rather than make impulse purchases and keep plunking stuff down with no rhyme or reason. (Last summer I had to remove over 40 rose bushes from the backyard of a brownstone so that the new owners could even walk through it. We left about 20 bushes for a border. These were impulse buys that turned into an obsession and finally a form of insanity.)

While paging through Home & Garden I stopped and looked at some beautiful room dividers. The Quantum Screen byRalph Pucci International cost $29,700.00. Now there certainly are people who can afford this, but most of us cannot. Unless we blow our savings, dip into our retirement, and max out our credit cards. But if you do cash in your 401K because you have to have a walnut, lacquer and gold leaf room divider, what happens when you plunk it down in the middle of your old stuff? Things that seemed very nice before will look shabby and old. You'll wonder who you are--the owner of junk or of a $29,700.00 screen. The crisis could turn existential, unless you get rid of all your old stuff and only have the screen or replace your shabby stuff with newer things, going into deep financial trouble. This is the new you. The one that might hang in the Hamptons with Gwyneth Paltrow, only well, she'll probably never invite you. So you're really just facing a bleak old age. And then one day, you're bored with the room divider (you thought this could never happen, but it does) and you've seen a newer, better one. You buy it, and all your old stuff once again looks old and shabby and like someone else once lived there. You wonder who you truly are and realize it would have been much cheaper at the get-go to hire a designer.