En route to the Cartier exhibit, I stopped at the main desk inside The Victoria and Albert Museum, and the flooring stopped me first—there’s always something in an old museum that gets me at the very first entry. Large stone pavers stretched across the hall, white and black beneath classic marble columns. The Chihuly glass sculpture hovered above the domed skylight at the main desk, but the floors pulled my attention.

Walk through the bronze-and-glass front doors and you don’t just enter a house—you step onto a Gilded Age set. (Literally. HBO’s The Gilded Age films here, so it’s easy to imagine Bertha Russell sweeping past.) The Elms was built as a maison de plaisance—a house devoted to pleasure—where every room connects to the garden beyond. Limestone walls, rare marbles, and European art define its precision and extravagance.