Beneath its two-story-high cathedral ceiling, Jack Lenor Larsen's living room in Long Island, N.Y., could have felt too vast for comfort. Instead, it's almost intimate because Larsen upholstered the entire space, straight to the ceiling's peak, with straw- colored Egyptian damask.

Interior designer Marjorie Shushan also grappled with visually cool surroundings: a Manhattan apartment with white-box rooms and no distinguishing architecture. To give the place character, she assembled an orchestra of textures: silk taffeta on the sofas, antique tapestry on the ottomans, 18th-century embroidery on the pillows.

Then, to underscore all that softness, she hauled in a granite coffee table with ...