bold & beautiful; A Manhattan social dynamo brings her flair for color and form to play in both a dazzling new apartment and her own fashion line.(Tory Burch)

Byline: Hamish Bowles

In the mossy velvet drawing room of Tory Burch's new apartment, high above Manhattan's madding crowds, an old-master painting depicts stately peacocks preening before humbler fowl in a seventeenth-century Dutch farmyard. Don't be fooled; this isn't quite a metaphor for the chatelaine of this dazzling residence. Admittedly highly decorative, with her biscuit tan, flashing smile, and svelte figure generally adorned in an enviable wardrobe created by her designer friends, Burch may be a sought-after addition to Manhattan's giddy charity-gala circuit, but she is strictly a New Age "swan." This real-life Bergdorf Blonde juggles it all. "She's one of the most organized people I know," says Daniel Romualdez, the urbane architect and decorator who worked with her on the apartment. "She never seems frazzled-she just gets it done." A mother to an extended family of six (she has twin

seven-year-old boys, a younger son, three, and is the stepmother of three girls, aged 20, eighteen, and fifteen), Burch takes her charity commitments as seriously as anything she does. She is involved with the American Ballet Theatre, and is a board member of the Henry Street Settlement and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where, as one of their Dream Team, she helps raise funds to honor the wishes of terminally ill patients, which she admits is "pretty sobering" work.

Recently she has taken the fashion experience gleaned from a decade working with designers Zoran, Ralph

Lauren, Vera Wang, and Narciso Rodriguez to establish her own fashion brand. The self-named Tory by TRB draws inspiration from her favorite era-the Ice Storm cusp of the sixties and seventies. Burch had initially explored the idea of reviving Jax, the classic sixties American sportswear brand, famed for their cigarette pants and slash-neck tops, beloved by her mother and such style icons as Jacqueline Kennedy and Babe Paley. For eighteen months, Burch plunged herself into fashion research and brand rebuilding, but ultimately the project came to nothing. Instead, she decided to redirect her efforts and to create "a luxury brand at a mid-price point." Her partner, Fiona Marin, who lives in Hong Kong, coordinates the production in China, which helps make this ideal a reality.

The breezy results-timeless but undusty pieces that owe a debt to her mother's vintage wardrobe of Gucci, Valentino, and Saint Laurent-are flying out of her stylish store on Manhattan's hip Lower East Side. "Tory is her brand," says Robert Burke, Bergdorf's fashion director, who recently opened a Tory by TRB boutique in the store, "and her brand is very much aimed at that young customer with a great taste level based on an understanding of vintage clothing and fashion history and tailoring."

Burch has brought her flair home, too. When she met her future husband, Christopher Burch, nearly a decade ago, he was living in a storied Manhattan hotel, in a pied-a-terre that she laughingly insists was no bigger than her present kitchen. They enjoyed a cozy three years together there. Soon after their 1997 marriage, however, Burch found herself expecting twin boys, so they upgraded to a two-bedroom apartment in the same establishment. The family soon swelled to include a third son. Still, Mr. Burch could not forsake his love of hotel living. So they decided to expand exponentially, acquiring two neighboring suites and, at a giddy price, a length of corridor from the hotel itself-a gesture so extravagant that it became gossip-column fodder.