Melissa Bellinelli

When I was 5, my parents decided I was old enough to decorate my own bedroom. They made a living by building spec houses in the San Francisco Bay Area, so they were always in the process of decorating something, and I was used to seeing wallpaper samples and fabric swatches lying around. But it was a thrill to be making the design decisions myself. My mother gave me a carefully edited selection of colors, fabrics and papers to choose from (I had no idea there were more choices than the ones being offered), and I was hooked.

Decorating my bedroom was exciting, but soon it was the dining room I was fixated on: I wanted one of my own. Like the young Marcel in “Swann’s Way,” I hated being sent to bed early, exiled from the adult world and the late-night conversation that took place there. I dreamed of the day I would be admitted to that world, and what my dining room would look like.

It never occurred to me that I would have to wait so long, or that a dining room could be so elusive.During college, I bided my time by decorating my dorm rooms. My grades were never good enough to put me in the ivy-covered building I envisioned, but I attended five colleges, so there was ample opportunity to experiment, each room more dispiriting than the one before. (My husband, who visited the first dorm with me recently, remarked that it bore a striking resemblance to a prison.)

When I was a junior, I escaped to Paris for a year and stayed a decade. And briefly, in my third apartment there, I had a magnificent dining room: a lovely space with 12-foot ceilings, elaborate moldings, 19th-century parquet floors and a marble fireplace. I covered the walls in a delicate flowered paper inspired by 18th-century patterns, my version of Jane Austen in Paris. Read