At around 11:15 on Monday morning, when Manhattan was mostly empty because of the Labor Day holiday, Graham Norton, the BBC talk show host, entered the ABC Carpet & Home store on Broadway and 18th Street. Dressed in a dark green, intricately patterned Thorsun shirt and slate gray Citizens of Humanity jeans (the same outfit he had worn earlier in the day on “Good Morning America”), he had on his face the anticipatory look of a child about to run free in his favorite toy shop.

Mr. Norton, 54, first visited the store about 15 years ago, when he had just bought a two-bedroom mews house in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan. “I was doing my talk show five nights a week, and all this money was rolling in,” he said. “I went a little crazy and bought this house that I neither need nor use a lot. But I love New York.”

Soon after he bought the house, a friend brought him to this temple of luxurious bohemia to buy some sheets. “We walked in and it was just love at first sight,” he said. “This place is just amazing.”

We quickly headed up to the fifth floor, billed as “classic & timeless,” and wandered around a grouping of eclectic furnishings: some new, some old (and occasionally tattered) and all carrying hefty price tags. “That’s rather nice,” he said as he paused to look closer at a vintage love seat with pale flowered fabric faded by time and worn away in one spot, and its matching sofa.