When Mario Buatta died in 2018, a few days shy of his 83rd birthday, he left no will. Which is not to say that he didn’t leave anything behind. “I am the original hoarder,” he would tell you.

He had a ferocious appetite for collecting that started when he was 11 and bought an 18th-century lap desk for $12 on layaway and continued until just months before his death. (There are invoices to prove it.)

It was a habit that filled every square foot of his parlor-floor townhouse apartment on East 80th Street (famously off-limits until the end), three storage units in Harlem, two in Staten Island and a Victorian gothic house in Thompson, Conn.

An avatar of the English country style, and of 1980s excess, Mr. Buatta was perhaps the only decorator to achieve fame on the East Coast, West Coast and all points between, during a time when the wealthy found their footing with their decorators, not their art advisers.