La Vie EN ROSE

Huge character and tiny dogs populate DANIELLE STEEL'S Paris apartment

Vanities /Grand Tour

'I don't like depressing stories. I don't like depressing art," says Danielle Steel, the gallerist and ultraprolific author of two new summer books, Daddy's Girls and Royal, both out from Delacorte Press. "I like art that you look at and you feel good." She splits her time between her San Francisco home and her Paris apartment. In Paris, where she spent months in pandemicinduced isolation, her penchant for mood-lifting environs has created an eclectic mix: a formal sitting room in which Japanese and Chinese antiques abut zebraprinted furniture picked out by an ex-husband; a bedroom brimming with small items that remind her of her children; and a desk, dotted with heart bibelots, where she spends much of her days writing on an Olympia typewriter. "The underlying theme in a lot of my books is hope," she says. "Hard things happen to the people, but they've survived them. That's really the message that we need right now—that this is really hard, but we will survive it."

KEZIAH WEIR