Over the years, the Madcap Cottage gents had moved up and down and sideways across Manhattan, from compact West Village walk-ups to carved-up brownstones on the Upper West Village. Each time we packed up our possessions it was a question of needing more space: We had morphed from jobs as magazine editors to interior designers, and the business had followed us home, literally. As the design gigs started to roll in, each apartment grew successively smaller thanks to mushrooming fabric samples, paint swatches, and voluminous mood boards.