In the slick, demanding world of New York City, the name Robert Metzger is synonymous with perfection in interior design. Conservatively flamboyant, Metzger has one credo: everything must be of the best available quality ... and comfortable. VIVE spoke with the designer in his New York apartment and discovered that this urbane gentleman is as elegant as the habitats he creates.

In New York, success is a palpable thing. The Big Apple worships success and New Yorkers are quick to embrace another idol. Talent is curted and feted, but if that talent is ephemeral, idols are discarded like yesterday's hot dog wrappers. To succeed in the world's most exciting Market Platz, it takes a demonstrable raw talent, finely honed to perfection, sheer courage - and a street-wise knowledge of what makes New York tick. Native-born New Yorker Robert Metzger understands his beloved but fickle city and his courtship of it has culminated in a happy-ever-after mutual love-match.

Inevitably, as Metzger's clientele grows, his reputation attracts scions of society, conglomerate and corporate clients, blue-blood aristocrats, theatrical and film luminaries, publishers ... People who have made their mark on New York and further afield and their counterparts overseas; people who demand the best of everything. They include American Express, the Architectural Digest, the late Henry Fonda and Elizabeth Taylor when she appeared on broadway in Noel Coward's 'Private lives'.

A love of drama, the flair and courage to mix a myriad styles, plus this designer's innate sense of colour and balance ensure that each client is given something unique and exciting. Metzger's style is not immediately recognisable to anyone but his committed cognoscenti, but his sense of drama is. He brings to each new assignment precisely 'The Look' required to create an harmonic blend of colour, interesting shapes and infinite panache.

Drama, and a predilection for introducing whimsical touches into his design, create a living, sparkling ambience with which all his clients feel very much at home - clients who remain loyal and keep coming back for more ... a sure sign that this designing son of New York has made it big in the Big Apple.

"My style has always been comfortable opulence", Robert Metzger explains, waving a manicured hand around his exquisitely furnished Manhatten apartment. Relaxing onto a Clarence House-covered banquette, the master craftsman of interior design and arbiter of all things stylish, opulent and classy, flicks and imaginary speck of dust from the perfect patina of a miniature 18th Century Italian commode.

"Look at this room. This was the base of an American pool table; these consoles are English Regency; the mirrors, Italian Louis the Sixteenth; this table, Charles the tenth - but this is a comfortable contemporary sofa and that, a contemporary coffee table. My whole theory in design is that I am the company. When I design a room, it has to be comfortable seating. You have to be able to say 'don't worry' and mean it when something is spilled".

A graduate of New York University, Robert Metzger majored in Business and minored in Real Estate and decided, early, that he did not want to go into the family meat-and-chicken trade. He laughs. "Can you see me as a purveyor of meat and poultry?" A more incongruous sight is hardly imaginable - a million light years away from this epitome of elegance. "I mean, they started work at four o'clock in the morning, just as I was going to bed! It would never have worked!" Real Estate did not beckon either and he finally settled on the perceived glamour of Wall Street, where he did investment analysis for two and half years.

Surely it is more than a cab ride from Wall Street to 'haute interieur'?

Metzger nods. "Of course. I left there because I decided that for the first part of my life, I had been making my mother happy. she thought a nice young man always goes into business - they don't go into what I really wanted to go into at the time which was fashion design. Now it was time to make me happy!"

And so young Robert Metzger cashes in a stock bonus, leaves the investment business and goes to Europe. Predictably, Paris fires its time-honoured barbs into his very soul and the ability of the French to evaluate the mundane to the sublime makes a lasting impression on Mrs. Metzger's boy from Wall Street. He enrols in every available course he can find and graduates a 'Europologist' cum laude.

Returning to America almost reluctantly, Metzger enrols in the New York School of Interior Design - to feed his 'Europology'. "... I never, never wanted to become an interior designer!" After graduating, however, he lands a job in an antique shop - a fantasy-come-true for him - and is inevitably catapulted into interior design as one client after another persuades him to not only deliver the marble bust or the blackamoor, but to stay and advise on its placement in the 'space'.

"I was the cheapest interior designer in New York City!" he chortles. "One glass of white wine, two salted pecans and they'd get their living-room tossed around! I pushed everything around, getting the whole thing done. I was using them like they were using me, except they were my guinea-pigs! The first time I had to order a sofa, I was up for two nights saying, 'It's not gonna fit! The arm height is wrong, the back is wrong!' of course, I was a virgin; doing things I would now never do. I never had a contract, never did a floor plan - never did anything!"

But also, his latent muse coming to the rescue, Robert Metzger never did anything wrong. The day arrives when he is asked to rectify another designer's 'nightmare' and Metzger 'rides home a winner' and is asked to continue designing. The pleasure Metzger still experiences when remembering those early days is evident and almost tangible, as he enthuses suddenly, "I was decorating. It was like shooting crap at Las Vegas and it's beginner's luck and you're winning!"

Drama, flamboyance, the over-the-top, the opulent - but never, never beyond good taste - are vital to Robert Mezger's equilibrium and his success in interior design. He may avoid the bland look which sometimes emanates from English style by cleverly employing bold colour, a dramatic sculpture, or a grandiose floral decoration to add life, a touch of theatre and a dash of humour in his rooms. However, the humour and the drama never obscure a very definite sense of pure class, style and good taste. He is able to enter a room, mentally scale out the proportions and never make a mistake. Quality is his catchword and that which gives his clients total confidence in his work.

"Colour, proportion and style ... It never matters what period mix you have if it's all the best of the old and the best of the new!" he asserts. Following this maxim, Robert Metzger eschews indulgence in fad and trend and seeks out the very best quality in modern design and antique craftsmanship which has stood the test of time and will continue to mellow with it.

Will there be dramatic changes in interior design in the next twenty years?

"When I hear about people living in tubes and sliding into bed, that's what really frightens me! That's not living; that's dying!" He shudders at the thought. "I can't think that way. I still live in the grand stage of living, where one really lives and there's opulence and excitement and wonderful food, plays, music ... I can't think of people living in knapsacks and stacked up like sardines".

Does this mean that he wipes his feet, metaphorically, on modern materials, such as perspex and chrome?

"I like neo-classical things. I do not like wildly modern things. I think you have to soften modern. Until 1981, there was more of a trend towards the contemporary. There was lucite, chrome, highly lacquered furniture, etcetera. I would say that has wanted 90%. I foresee a return to tradition, opulence and elegance, but in more comfortable forms than before".

This dynamo of design, greatly admired and envied by his peers and public alike, prefers working with 'living' substances such as leather, silks, precious metals, beautifully aged and cared-for timbers, wool and velvet. His love of chinoiserie is evident, as he marries French and English antique chairs with coromandel screens and Ch'ing Dynasty audience chairs with a contemporary chaise longue. His admiration for the purity of Japanese style is evident in many of his designs and his Central Park West apartment boasts a superb Japanese lacquered chest. Despite having lived in this same apartment for thirty years, he is still collecting for it. Metzger says he can always find a place for something he loves and his apartment, with its Aladdin's Cave of treasures, is testimony to this.

"My greatest thrill is shopping! There is nothing that makes me hyperventilate more than going out and looking for fabulous things! I am the most compulsive buyer. I'd rather shop than do anything in the world!" the flat, native New York accent asserts. "I get off a plane, jump in a tub and a half-hour later, I'm hitting the avenues!"

Isn't that hard work?

Metzger shakes his aristocratic head. "To me it's not hard work. I'm one of those people who don't hate to get up in the morning. I could work seven days a week - I love to work. I have thirty clients - I don't want to shop for food! I don't want to shop at a supermarket!" He shudders.

"Don't ever take me to Bloomingdale's, either. After ten minutes, my head is swimming and I'm swaying", he groans, clutching his head dramatically. "I love to shop for objets d'art, furniture, clothes, fabrics (no period fabrics, though, or old brocades); I like freshness, anything decorative".

In his supremely elegant sitting room, with its tasteful blend of Regency bergeres, Chinese coromandel and Henry Moore, Metzger points to the sly satyric smile on a cheeky Italian Renaissance cherub on the console. "You can see that I'm not afraid to take a chance", he says, "to show a little flair, drama, whimsy ... I don't like everything to be serious. I like whimsy in a room, along with quality, comfort, opulence, colour - and I like mixing.

"My apartment is a kind of autobiography - as all personal spaces are", he explains. "I remember exactly when and where I bought every piece. Everything must have a purpose, even if it's just sheer, outrageous, beauty!"

What advice has he for someone just beginning to furnish a home?

"Buy one fabulous piece that will go with you throughout your life. Spend the most money you can afford and buy the absolute best quality for that money".

Paradoxically, for all his professed and observed love and use of drama and opulence in design, Metzger gives his clients an almost-English, traditional, homey comfort. A personal space at once luxurious, often theatrical, but totally habitable. He explains:

"If you pick up a magazine and see a chrome and lucite room, you think, 'God! This looks so tired!' and then you turn the page and see a wonderful English country room and think, 'This was good twenty years ago - and it's going to be good twenty years from now!'

"You can tell what's going to be timeless and what's just a trend. Remember: this year's gimmick or trend is next year's bad taste!"

Because they are timeless and classic, Metzger's spaces weather well. This almost fanatically eclectic collector ensures that deep comfortable modern sofas sit easily on Bessarabian or Aubusson carpets and French commodes nestle empathetically underneath modern paintings and mirrors ... A dramatic and elegant statement in which feet-on-the-coffee-table are not out of place!

Robert Metzger is not really inspired by other designers. Although he admires the work of Albert Hadley and Francois Catroux and the style of the late Duchess of Windsor, he is never impressed to the extent of being moulded by individual people. Of the present trend of highlighting audio/stereo equipment as 'objects', Metzger muses, but concedes: "This is the hot trend for the '80s and '90s. Years ago, we spent thousands of dollars to hide the stereo. Now we spend thousands of dollars to show it! Audio rooms are not very pretty, but they're hot, very trendy at the moment - Media Rooms, we call them - and they're very, very popular. It's the new toy!"

The designer does not relish being given carte blanche by a client, preferring to work along with them.

"I once did an apartment for a Japanese client (in Japan) on a 'just-do-it-and-call-me-when-it's-ready' basis and I nearly went crazy!" he confesses. "There's a certain bouncing-ball effect you get from talking to clients; a reinforcement you get from talking to someone and we all learn from each other that way. I much prefer it".

So, too, does an increasing number of satisfied clients, both corporate and private, around the world, who value highly his unbounded energy for working seven days a week if necessary, and his enthusiasm for finding precisely what the job requires. With most of his clients he enjoys an easy, relaxed, almost intimate relationship.

"In ten minutes, I know more about them than their best friend knows in their whole life!" he jokes ... or does he?

People phone from all over the world inviting his appraisal and often purchase of valuable objets d'art and furniture. He has the rare ability to accurately value a piece from a photograph. Sometime in the future, Metzger plans to endorse furniture, fabrics and other materials in a licensing operation similar to those which have proved so successful for his colleagues in design, Pierre Cardin and Yves St. Laurent. This 'pret-a-porter' approach to merchandising seems an enigma for one so committed to the unique, but Metzger has a strong belief in 'getting things out of the museum and to the people' and, with his unerring business acument to date, should do extremely well from it.

Does he find time for relaxation and exercise?

He jokes, "I'm thirty five years old already! I like to maintain myself, so I go to a gym. I used to go three evenings a week and then I found I would find any excuse in the world not to go: I'm tired; it's too close to my dinner appointment, so I gave myself a gift for Christmas! I now have a trainer who comes to the house on Monday, Wednesday and Friday..."

And no doubt he grabs you, we suggest irreverently.

Overacting delightfully, Metzger laughs, "I grab HIM! He comes to the house at 8.30 in the morning and we exercise for one hour and then, if I get to the gym once or twice a week, I've done the whole thing. But the main thing is, basically, to keep yourself healthy; your heart rate up etcetera". Despite living in the world's crime capital, he has never felt the need to learn self-defense because, as he mentions almost apologetically, "I have a car and a driver".

Metzger has it made in his beloved hometown.

"I love New York!" he shouts. "I love to travel, but I love to come home to New York. There is nothing - nothing! - that offers more freedom in any phase of anyone's life than New York! You have financial freedom, physical, emotional and mental freedom. You're not worrying about Poor Tax and Rich Tax - look at the French! They're afraid to show anything! You walk into a building that looks like it's going to fall down, you open the door and - it's a palazzo! France, Italy - they're all afraid to show things. We don't have this in New York. We are tough people and we're resilient!

"New York is exposed to so many different people and products. It's a melting pot. We create trends, we create style - and then the rest of the world carries on like Paris, London and Milan. Paris is elegance, flamboyance and freedom all rolled into one and I love the lifestyle, the clothes - and the food! - but still, nothing is like New York! New York!"

Somewhere between the moon and New York City, Robert Metzger's star shines brightly.