OFFICIALLY, the rose garden belongs to Richard Buckley, Tom Ford’s husband. It’s the product of the only sort of deal that Ford—among the shrewdest businessmen in the history of fashion—would ever make, one whose terms were highly favorable to himself: Buckley could have his roses, and in exchange, Ford got to make every other decision on their new house in the Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, which for more than half a century had belonged to Betsy Bloomingdale. Ford does not cede control willingly. “I can’t help but assert myself,” he says. “That probably makes me very difficult to live with.” He blames his Virgo nature: precise, methodical, relentlessly observant, playfully naughty if he trusts you. (The designer Stella McCartney, one of his closest friends and another Virgo, says that any understanding of Ford and of their friendship begins with this astrological detail. The stylist Carine Roitfeld, his longest creative collaborator and another Virgo, concurs. So might have his late friend Karl Lagerfeld, a Virgo, too.)

On a warm evening in June, the flowers are in abundant bloom. Buckley, a writer and Ford’s partner of more than 30 years, consulted a rosarian in Santa Barbara who had helped Oprah Winfrey and Barbra Streisand with their roses. They excavated six feet and welcomed 10,000 earthworms, to the giddy delight of Jack, Ford and Buckley’s son, who turns seven in September. Ford has a penchant for orchids—flowers of heat and dark—but in fact it was he who arrayed the garden in a perfectly gradated spectrum, the way some obsessives organize their books or their apps. Red roses, which he can’t abide, crouch in the back. A few ambitious shrubs stand taller than the others, balancing on stakes. The asymmetry troubles him; symmetry is very important. It is not surprising to learn that his favorite rose, Koko Loko, is beige.

“Beauty gives me great joy, but it also gives me great sadness,” Ford explains once we’ve returned to the living room. We sit so that I can see mainly the right side of his face—the side you will always see in pictures. He says that he has come to think of himself as an image, a product, and over time you learn how to display the product at its most favorable angle. Kate Moss will give you only one side, he says. “When I see the rose, and I smell the rose, all I can think of is that the rose is going to wither and be dead. But that’s one of the things that endows it with its beauty. If it were permanent, you wouldn’t even notice it.”

Ford has often spoken of his preoccupation with death, the clock incessantly ticking in his head, and he has also often spoken of his dependence on alcohol, a palliative for his natural shyness. (In May, he celebrated 10 years of sobriety.) Perhaps these two things above all—the morbid cast of his temperament, his brain’s constant thirst for dopamine—explain why, at 58, Ford is busier than he has ever been. The brand he launched only 13 years ago now earns $2 billion in annual retail sales across men’s and women’s ready-to-wear, accessories, fragrance, cosmetics, and eyewear, a legitimate rival to 100-year-old French houses. The writer-director-producer of two films, he has another two in the works. And this spring, he succeeded Diane von Furstenberg as chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, or CFDA.