Ms. Golightly's apartment

Ms. Golightly's New York apartment in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is, for all its austerity, utterly charming.   The space is tiny and sparsely decorated but charming still, perhaps because it is the only thing of Holly's that reflects who she truly is. Outside, she wears faux pearl necklaces and rhinestone tiaras and Raybans at daytime and sweet-talks moneyed gentlemen into giving her 50 dollars for the powder room, but in her apartment she is her own person whoever that person may be.

At her house party, she delays the little black dress and instead tootles about the room in a bath towel-- stylishly draped by Hubert de Givenchy, but a bath towel still. The couch is actually a bath tub, the fridge a shoe closet, the kitchen drawers a step stool, and the mailbox a nook for her perfume. A wild thing, she refuses to be owned and to own anything, and so the walls are stark white and unpapered and unpacked luggage are strewn about the floor. She does not even have a key. She refuses to nest, you see. Nonetheless, the tiny apartment becomes her home still and inevitably and it is marvelous.

When later in the movie Holly has designs on a wealthy Brazilian, she decides to change herself for him and so learns Portuguese, cooking and knitting. She redecorates her apartment, too. When she fills it with proper chairs and pictures on the walls and a table with a nice tablecloth and flowers on it, the apartment somehow becomes empty and violently sad. It is not hers anymore. Even the cat seems out of place.