his grandmother’s lineage can be traced to a place whose name translates as “beautiful view.” He believes his love for his signature pattern, black-and-white striping, derives from Cecil Beaton’s scheme for Audrey Hepburn’s transformative My Fair Lady gown. (Cross maintains that in the heyday of La Maison Moderne, a Chelsea catchphrase sprang up around his ubiquitous patterning: “I don’t care what you get me, as long as it comes in a white box with a black-and-white bow.”) But for bequeathing the idea that beauty is livable, and if fully accomplished carries a sense of overarching consonance, Eliza Doolittle has nothing on Frances Louise Main, who would sweep her grandson away to New York twice a year to shop. “She was one of those great old Southern women who had great style,” Cross recalls. The pluck Cross inherited from her is what allowed him to look at a dilapidated New York basement space and envision what has become one of the city’s hidden jewels of you’d-never-guess-it-from-the-street interior design. (Not for nothing did The New York Times spend three days photographing it for a feature last Christmas; meanwhile, Playboy magazine has used chez Cross to evoke New Orleans for a Crescent City-themed shoot and borrowed Cross’ bar to shoot part of its hottest bartenders spread. Once, a photographer for the magazine situated three models in the bed where Cross normally sleeps singly. “My father,” he says with a chuckle, “would have been so proud.”) The black-and-white striping, so painstakingly carried out that even orchids are tethered to their stakes by tiny black-and-white bows, also enhances a space that at its widest point measures only 9 feet. “Mirrors are your friends,” as Cross likes to say. But even more useful is an ability to see what could be instead of what is. When Cross’ great-grandfather wanted to marry off his daughter to a neighbor with a much larger farm, she complied mostly because she wasn’t in a position not to — she was 13, a “tween” by today’s developmental reckoning. Her betrothed was a man of 50. On her 18th birthday, she left her husband with the two children she had birthed during their arranged marriage. No way around it — renovations leave calluses. The Frances Main brand of refinement is all over the Kein Cross brand of, well, everything. His grandmother was a devotee of “the whole creaming of the hands thing,” Cross says. “I would cream my hands and feet along with her,” he remembers. Little mystery that Cross carries a line of eponymous body creams that evoke to the nose the women Harper Lee had fixed in her mind when she wrote, in To Kill a Mockingbird, with nostalgia for the feminine battle against the ravages

of sticky Southern summers: “Ladies bathed before noon, after their 3-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.” And making the best of a bad situation? That, from the Frances Main constitution, is evident in the way Cross playfully situated his yoga platform and carefully shingled free weights near the hulking boiler for the entire building, and in the custom-made fabric, in his favorite accent color of a nickel shade of gray, that he selected to clothe ceilings mottled by years of leakage. Then there are the accent pieces infused with story. Next to the hinged glass door leading to what Cross calls a “wet-bath,” essentially a high-end take on a train car lavatory, with the shower drain at the base of the commode, sits an enameled table that once stored the instruments of a Jazz Ageera doctor. Today it’s where Cross stacks his supply of black-and-whitestriped towels that are so thick they look as if they could sponge up floodwaters. He picks up a utensil that looks like an elongated duckbill replicated in ivory, with plier handles for parting the beak. Sensing the futility of the exercise, he quickly gives up quizzing a visitor as to its imagined purpose. The device once sat on his grandmother’s dressing table — it was used for stretching out the fingers of kid gloves so that women could slip them on. Cross scoffs at the anti-hoarding dictum that for everything new that comes into the home, something must go. Does the overstuffed home exist, or is it an urban legend, like a Spanish-moss-draped, railcarwidth wonderland sunk into lower Manhattan? “Is that possible?” Cross demands of the house that can’t accept another accessory. “Bite your tongue! This is minimalism for me.” As if to prove his point, Cross pads away to find an issue of Playboy for which he provided the backdrop. He doesn’t find it, but he does exclaim, after some shuffling, “Oh! I’m so excited! I found the instructions for my X-Box!” It’s difficult to imagine Cross developing a twinkle in his eye over a cold piece of technology that isolates its owner, when his stock in trade is the one-of-a-kind item with a past. But he’s adapting. He envisions a line of home accessories he’ll pitch to Wal-Mart. After all, the evermore- style-conscious retailer is not only based in his hometown, but a Wal-Mart parking lot abuts the property line of his childhood home, now a Civil War museum. But mass production will never completely shift Cross’ focus from heirloom pieces destined to find a place in design schemes generations in the making. “Right now,” Cross says of the speculative nature of his loyal New York interiors clientele, “I’m buying furniture for grandchildren that haven’t happened yet.”