Some family taste is passed down, some is disavowed. Some lies dormant, inside of us, only to emerge years later, when we realize we've painted a room the exact color of our childhood kitchen. In this issue, we set out, simply, to look at how different kinds of families live in New York right now. Our definition was elastic, befitting a city in which families come in every denomination. We've got two extravagantly bearded brothers sharing an apartment and workshop in Brooklyn. We've got two pairs of cohabitating twins. We've got an apartment that Annabelle Selldorf carved out for a mother and her daughters in the unlikeliest of spaces: the track of an old YMCA. We've got a pet pig. We've got a man with no kids but arguably the largest family in the world. And then there's Gloria Vanderbilt, whose family is the stuff of American legend. For her, childhood houses were not always happy places. Yet even then she knew just how to transform them, taking a drab room in her Aunt Gertrude's home in Old Westbury and turning it into something out of Cairo. And just like that, she was at home again.

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