A Vintage Life in The Chelsea Hotel.

As the long, slow death of the fractious, former bohemian enclave known as the Chelsea Hotel continues, Suzanne Lipschutz isn’t mourning much. She’s moving on.

One recent snowy morning, a reporter picked her way through the construction that has been ongoing for years at the hotel to the third-floor apartment that has been Ms. Lipschutz’s home for more than two decades.

Not that it looked that way. Chock-a-block with Persian furniture, Austrian pottery, Tibetan nesting tables, swags of tasseled damask and brocade, Tiffany lamps and pierced brass lamps and lamps made from armadillos (yes, armadillos) and more antique wallpaper, wainscoting and paneling than you’d think a two-room apartment could hold, the place appeared to have been put together back in the 1880s, around the time the Chelsea was built.

You can see why Ms. Lipschutz — whose store, Secondhand Rose, famous for its vintage wallpapers and once as much of a Manhattan icon as the Chelsea — would be reluctant, even fearful, to dismantle her distinctive habitat. She is among the rent-stabilized tenants, she said, whom the new owner has asked to relocate to another floor.

Before moving to the Chelsea, Ms. Lipschutz, now 73, lived all over the West Village, raising her son, Luke Joerger, in a series of lofts and railroad apartments that she won and lost in typical old-Manhattan fashion. Buildings burned down, rents tripled, but she wallpapered them all, sometimes even papering the floors and the furniture. Her store, which she opened in 1965 on Hudson Street with a busted Tiffany magnolia lamp she found in a junkie’s apartment and 19th-century furniture harvested from the street, ranged around the Village in various locations for two decades before settling in SoHo, then TriBeCa, then lower Fifth Avenue, riding the waves of boom and bust and an appetite, perhaps now waning, for period wallpapers. These days, vintage paper is much harder to find, she said, and her own appetite to do so is lessening: “I’d like to sell out my stock in the next few years. I’m not having as much fun anymore.”

In the ’70s, John Lennon and Yoko Ono were clients. So was Paul Simon, another Dakota resident, and Ms. Lipschutz’s neighbor Julian Schnabel, who liked to make paintings on her vintage linoleum, and with whom she bartered for work. She tried to barter with Frank Stella, too. Not that she knew who he was the day he wandered in, when she offered him furniture for his paint-splattered shoes.

“They looked like Jackson Pollock had made them,” she said. “I said: ‘Who are you? If you give me your shoes, I’ll give you anything you want.’ ”

William Wegman photographed her with Fay Ray and her daughter, Batty, atop an assemblage of gilded furniture. Frank Serpico liked hanging out in her Hudson Street store; when a pair of local thugs stole some Victorian quilts, he helped her track them down, she said, which wasn’t difficult because the burglars had made the quilts into pants and were wearing them around the West Village. For a few seasons in the 1980s, photographs of the store were part of the opening montage for Saturday Night Live. “Those were my salad days,” said Ms. Lipschutz, whose deep, husky voice is as ornate as one of her Victorian wallpapers. “People said it was the most beautiful store in the world. I thought it would never end.”

 When Luke went to college, she said, she wanted to downsize. The Chelsea, where many of her friends lived, was a natural ecosystem for someone with her florid tastes.

“Stanley and I fell in love with each other,” she said of Stanley Bard, the hotel’s longtime manager and gatekeeper, who was ousted in 2007. “And that was it.”

He offered Ms. Lipschutz a one-bedroom apartment for $1,575. She stripped its layers of grubby linen paint and rubbed wax into the rich brown paneling and door frames until they glowed. She collaged the walls with period wallpaper and borders, and wainscoting she salvaged from a Brooklyn townhouse. She found a stained-glass door from the Aesthetic Movement at ABC Carpet & Home, and took it apart to make transom windows.

In the tiny kitchen, she added a 1930s kitchen cabinet, along with green medical cabinets from the 1940s and a mosaic of glass tiles that for years was a work in progress. When her son married, she persuaded him and his wife to move into the building, too, which they did for a few years until their children were school-age, living in an apartment on the ninth floor.

“We had so much fun,” she said. “If you were sad about something, you could get in your nightgown and go to someone’s apartment and cry. If someone was cooking, they’d share their food. It was the most wonderful place to live. You were never alone.” Now, Ms. Lipschutz is one of only two tenants on her floor, she said: “Those who didn’t have the strength to fight have gone.”

Zoe Pappas, head of the tenants’ association, said there are 83 tenants in 52 apartments at the Chelsea, 42 of which are rent-stabilized. The new owner, Ed Scheetz, has offered a few options to those tenants, whose apartments need to be gut-renovated to bring the building up to code: accept a buyout, be temporarily relocated to the Martha Washington Hotel while their apartments are worked on, or permanently move to apartments on lower floors. (The hotel has been closed to guests since 2011.)

“We gained something very important,” said Ms. Pappas, whose group won a lawsuit against the previous owners. “The right to live in the Chelsea until we want to leave, or die.”

At first, Ms. Lipschutz balked at all the offers. She couldn’t imagine that her belongings would be safe during a move, temporary or otherwise, and she couldn’t imagine leaving the building. But having shed her own skin so many times before the Chelsea chapter of her life, she began to realize the possibility and promise of renewal.

“I wasn’t going to move,” she said. “But you see the water damage from Stanley’s day. None of us ever complained, we just fixed it. You could have your boyfriend the electrician come in. Now, they are going to have to put in new heating, new venting, conduits for the wiring. By the time they are done, what have I got?”

As further incentive, she said, the apartment she was offered is across the hall from a friend, and the landlord has accommodated all her demands.

Threading her way through the wires, the dust and the racket of her hallway down to the new apartment, she pointed out the 11-inch baseboards that the landlord has already installed for her and the arched doorways he allowed her to enlarge. She described how the floor will be stained a dark mahogany and the walls painted with three coats of ivory paint.

“I’m going to have a clean, white space,” she said. “I will have my beautiful objects, and like every space before, it will evolve.”

Back upstairs, snow began falling gently outside the stained-glass windows and, for a moment, all was quiet. Then the cat swatted a teacup off the table, upended herself in a piece of Austrian pottery, and from the ceiling above, the power tools started wailing again. (courtesy N.Y.Times)