Forgive Me, Virginia Woolf - NYTimes.com 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. I left that dining room behind to move to New York in 1980, confident that there was another one in my future. But while the 500-square-foot apartment I found in Manhattan had nearly everything a person could wish for - high ceilings, a fireplace, a terrace and so much charm that I still live there - it didn't have a dining room. Still, I didn't give up hope. I even had the wallpaper picked out: Bibliotheque, the popular Brunschwig & Fils trompe l'oeil bookshelf pattern by Richard Lowell Neas, an interior designer and decorative painter known for his murals. The pattern comes in three color combinations, and I preferred the predominantly red one. Over the years, I had been carrying one of my mother's samples around with me, pinning it up in every apartment I lived in, waiting to find the dining room it was destined for. Along the way, I met the man who became my husband. I was in England, taking a class on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group at Oxford; we were introduced by mutual friends. And as if true love weren't enough, he came with an 18th-century rose-covered cottage in the Cotswolds. But no dining room. Charleston Farm, the home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, was nearby, though, and it did have a dining room - a very nice one, where the Bloomsbury artists gathered for long evenings of food and conversation. It was close enough so I could visit frequently and take in all the details: the black walls that Bell stenciled, the round table she painted. And the chairs Roger Fry designed, which still looked so modern, with their natural cane seats and backs, and the wood frames painted red. When I discovered I could order reproductions, my fantasy began to take shape. The Bloomsbury chairs, at a round table, with Bibliotheque on the walls - all that was missing was the room itself. It took a while, but in 2001 the dining room of my dreams finally became a reality. After visiting a friend who was selling his house on Long Island, we fell in love with it, bought it and sold the cottage in England. If we were going to have a country house, we decided, it really ought to be in the country where we lived. This house didn't have a dining room, either, but there was space to build an addition. I filled my new dining room with the chairs, the round table, a chandelier I inherited from my mother, my husband's Regency chest of drawers and a few other pieces, and covered the walls in the red Bibliotheque. Then I got down to the business of entertaining. But it wasn't long before I realized that something was wrong. I didn't like sitting in the dining room. Or walking through it. Or the way it looked from other rooms. It was beautiful, even elegant, but it was red. And slowly it dawned on me: I hate red rooms. Moreover, this wasn't a formal English townhouse; it was a sunny house by the water and it needed a bright, summery dining room. For a couple of years I agonized over the mistake I had made - the hideously expensive mistake. "If you hate it that much," a friend said, "you've got to change it." But that only made it worse. I didn't have the money to redecorate the room and repaper it in the lighter version of Bibliotheque, which I should have chosen to begin with. So I would have to live with it. And then one day, everything changed. I wasn't feeling well, so I went in for a checkup. Soon after, I got a call from the doctor telling me I had an advanced case of ovarian cancer. I couldn't help thinking of what Oscar Wilde supposedly said not long before he died, about how he was fighting a "duel to the death" with his wallpaper and one of them had to go. Within a week, I had not only found an extraordinary oncologist, but also called the wallpaper hanger. And although it was undoubtedly sacrilegious to the memory of the Bloomsbury artists, I had the chairs painted white. That was several years ago, and I'm relieved to report that the wallpaper and I are still living happily together. Neither of us is planning to go anywhere.