Did I ever tell you the story of the twentieth-century man in a third-century church, his hand resting on an eighteenth-century banister?" Julian Schnabel enjoys this notion of displaced time. "Velvet and cobwebs — I'm of the Miss Havisham school of interior decorating," he says. "And I see all the objects around me as utilitarian: they are transformers that get me to another place. Anyway, I feel better in here."

"Here" is a downtown loft building that evokes a secret corner of Venice a couple of centuries ago, or perhaps a set for Citizen Kane. On my first visit I see Schnabel sitting at the piano with Gary Oldman; they are combining Tom Waits's version of "Waltzing Matilda" with the Eagles's "Desperado," singing both lyrics at once. As the night goes on, I notice traces of a dozen European cities and past epochs — all far away, yet all at home — and after a few hours I reenter the world refreshed, as if! I had returned from travels over land and sea and time.

In the main studio the echoes are of Madrid. "Summer 1978," Schnabel recalls, paraphrasing one of the "excerpts from life" he related in his 1987 hook, CVJ. "I was staying in the flamenco bar district. I walked to the Prado, saw some great Bosch paintings, left the Prado, walked outside, dizzy. Thought I'd go rowing on the lake of the Parque del Buen Retiro, beside the Palacio Velazquez. As I stepped into the boat, it slid out from under me. I watched the opaque green of the lake come between me and my sunglasses. To return to my hotel, I had to walk through downtown Madrid, accompanied only by the sound of water squishing in my shoes."

"Twelve years later," he continues, "back in Madrid and a little drunk, I was sitting in the cement courtyard of a friendly bar, surrounded by young painters from the Taller of the Circulo de Bellas Artes. I thought of the ducks in the lake a few blocks away and toasted them in my best Spanish: 'Por los patos del Buen Retiro! To the ducks of the Buen Retiro!' "Now five large red-velvet paintings with references to the ducks of Buen Retiro are leaning against the studio walls.

Dislocations seem to have a special resonance for Schnabel and his art. Besides the conventional spots — the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Tate in London, the Whitney and the Guggenheim in New York — his paintings and sculpture are often found in peculiar overseas locations. Four white paintings in the Los Patos series are in the permanent collection at Madrid's Reina Sofia, Spain's leading museum of modern art, which is housed in a converted hospital building. The Recognitions paintings were installed in 1988 at the Cuartel del Carmen, an abandoned fourteenth-century monastery and military barracks in Seville. From 1990 to 1995 three twenty-two-foot-square paintings are hanging in the Maison Carrée, a first- or second-century Roman temple in Nimes.

Decades before Schnabel put paintbrush (or hand) to canvas (or velvet or plates), the studio I survey from the balcony was a perfume factory. The looming nineteen-foot pillars and massive patched walls might dwarf another artist's work. Not Schnabel's. Behind his paintings the irregular patina of gray plaster opens up a visual field that suggests the outdoors. "I like to paint outside," he says, in Montauk in summer and Florida in winter. Then he brings paintings into this room "where they congeal." The view from the balcony reminds me of Schnabel's words in a 1985 catalogue: "There exists a tradition of loss and sadness that is epitomized in the perfection of the surviving statues around the pool at Hadrian's Villa .... They are joined together in the fraternity of something missed."

The balcony leads me to the music room where a Jacopo Vignali painting from 1695 hangs near a Steinway grand piano from 1930. Nearby, an eighteenth-century French daybed bears tattered upholstery of silk velvet in brilliant pink. A French Empire sleigh bed is neighbor to a painted metal field marshal's chaise with its original Napoleonic bees upholstery. An Aubusson carpet contrasts with the bare concrete floor, and Schnabel's Sublime Vision de Merde, 1989, fills a side wall. In a corner two matador's trajes de luces from Seville in the 1950s glitter on T-shaped steel crosses made by Schnabel, while tables by Frank Lloyd Wright and Antonin Raymond are ready for everyday use. "These juxtapositions are about creating an illusion of memory," says Schnabel.

A bear skeleton strides across the piano top; a perfect swan skeleton and massive hippopotamus skull are placed on furniture like vases of flowers. Their source, says Schnabel, is the "mysterious London attic" of Alistair McAlpine, a man of "amazing enthusiasm" who runs a West End shop, Erasmus & Co., and has a zoo in Australia. "He has all these rare objects — neolithic stone axes, Celtic and Byzantine rings, feathers from the Amazon."

Disparate objects conspire to create a sense of ludic luxury. As a first-time visitor, I am gifted with the birthright of kings: I am at utter ease amid timeless treasures. The disarray reminds me of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Thomas McEvilley wrote of Schnabel's paintings, "In their layering of different ages they present human history also as a kind of long communal walk down the streets of everyday life where clumsily scrawled names and phrases on stained swatches of cloth are like bits of paper flying by in the wind." He might as well have been talking about Schnabel's house.

A labyrinth of smaller spaces are clustered on the upper floors. The nursery is furnished with 1920s pieces from upstate New York, an Alvar Aalto sideboard, a table made by Schnabel, and a large 1985 canvas by Don Van Vliet, also known as Captain Beefheart, as well as work by George Condo and James Nares and paintings by Schnabel's children. A seventeenthcentury Belgian tapestry hangs, nonchalant, behind a bathroom door. In the kitchen, drawings by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Joseph Beuys rest against a shimmering orange and yellow silk brocade appliqué on silk velvet, a panel from a Moroccan tent.

The artist's own bedroom used to be a bathroom; it still has a sink. "I feel here as if I am in a tent," he says, "on a faraway campaign." The windows are covered. "It's all about having your eyes open. You can look into a corner of a room and see the world. Instead of a window there is a great painting." Here are Dürer and Picasso, Piranesi and Picabia and Man Ray. "The artist's humanity and the decisions he took that's my river view."

In a catalogue, Schnabel is quoted as saying, "All paintings, in fact, are metaphoric .... It reminds you of something that you might have seen, a key to your imagination .... A painting can't help but allude to a world of associations that may have a completely other face than that of the image you are looking at." Perhaps that is why the defiantly diverse mosaic of the artist's house is harmonious, even soothing. Objects are not merely their distinct selves but are poignant, carefully chosen clues — keys to the imagination. Crossing the threshold, the visitor enters a unified landscape of references, inspirations, recognitions. To these we add our own and are welcomed into that warm conspiracy of metaphoric association called home.