A Rustic Haven for a Life Remade Most days, Alison Aldrich walks from her co-op in the West Village to the stately old building on Washington Square Park where she works as a professor at New York University. There, each year, she helps train a few hundred new social workers, many of whom will fan out into the city she has adored since moving here as a 19-year-old newlywed in 1965. She knows how trying the work can be from a dozen years in the field, most of them at Bailey House, which serves the H.I.V. and AIDS communities. It was bleaker in the mid-1990s, when she first worked there, just before the advent of an effective drug cocktail. But Ms. Aldrich, a former debutante from Boston who is now 68, came to love all aspects of the work - even when, out on calls in cashmere sweaters and designer boots, she was mistaken for an addict trying to score or a representative of Child Protective Services. Over time, counseling others helped her confront her own longstanding issues of identity and addiction. "I was an alcoholic," she said, "and I really felt that eventually I would kill myself." Her personal narrative unwinds with startling candor as she gives a reporter a tour of her two-bedroom apartment. It is the first home made entirely for her, out of three modest studio apartments in a building constructed in the 1920s to house dock- and railworkers. Her designer, Thomas Cooper, remains a close friend, although, as he deadpanned, "she was determined to be in the driver's seat on this one, which, I have to tell you, made my life a living hell." As Ms. Aldrich puts it, "Getting sober, coming out, the apartment really is a reflection of that." A recovering alcoholic, she was married twice, but is now openly out, she said, and beginning a new relationship. "I wanted a lovely and connected, but not stuffy, place to be alone in," she said, "but also to share with my family and friends." It is not lost on most of them how far this home is removed from the style in which she grew up, in Hamilton, Mass. The Beaux-Arts house she lived in there, modestly known as the house at Rock Maple Farm, has its own web page. But unless she is practically coerced, Ms. Aldrich avoids discussing her family background. "The hardest thing for me is to talk about the world of privilege I grew up in," she said. The patriarch of the family was her great-grandfather Nelson W. Aldrich, a United States senator from Rhode Island from 1881 to 1911, who is best known for laying the legislative groundwork for the Federal Reserve. He is also known for entering public life as a man of somewhat modest means and becoming a much richer one while in office. A number of muckraking books have detailed how he did it, but none as briskly as Ms. Aldrich: "He passed laws so the rich could stay rich," she said. And he was rewarded with trinkets large and small - invited, for example, to invest early on in public utility companies. In a childhood full of nannies and boarding schools, Ms. Aldrich found joy in art, design and nesting. "I was attracted to colors and cool new designers like Marimekko," she said. I ran away from antiques and instead was always tchotchke-ing things up. Mr. Cooper has much to say about this tendency, none of it kind. It was about a dozen years ago, after finally coming into her own - earning a bachelor's degree from N.Y.U. after her own children had gone to college, and then a master's degree, and establishing a career as a social worker - that she bought two combined studios here for about $500,000. When an adjacent one came on the market in 2010, for $350,000, she grabbed it. Peter Holtzman, of Downtown Designworks Architecture, joined the apartments, creating a loft-like space with bedrooms at either end. The renovation cost about $60,000, not including furnishings. Perhaps it is not surprising that the things Ms. Aldrich most identifies with here are the workmanlike details: the planked floors, the brick, the band of metal between the hearth and the mantel that secures the fire escapes. In a way, this apartment is a symbol of her evolving life, and she seems genuinely awed by the richly textured quality of what she has created. Everything comes late for me.