Close-up with Taylor Swift...

Taylor Swift had a surprise for Vogue. She wanted to take us somewhere she had shown no journalist before. And so it was, on a muggy afternoon in New York, as the city began to empty for the long Memorial Day weekend, that I sat in Bubby's - a homemade-pie-specialising dining institution, defending the American table and stealing recipes from Grandma" - in Tribeca, and waited.

Swift's arrival, three minutes later than the time specified, was without fanfare, though surely  everyone must have noticed her. For starters, she's freakishly tall, standing well over 6ft in her towering YSL brogue heels, with long, lean limbs and the tottery gait of a baby giraffe. So was her  look decidedly bold, like a modern-day Sandra Dee, in a flippy, powder-blue Miu Miu skirt that swung around mid-thigh and a cream blouse. A tan Tod's Sellas tote dangled from her wrist. Her bobbed hair  was set in Fifties waves and her mouth painted that quintessential Swiftian red. "There's something about New York that makes me want to dress nicely," she explained of her polished appearance.
We scoured the menu and chatted about the upcoming holiday weekend, Swift scrolling through her phone to find pictures of the beach outside her eight-bedroom Rhode Island mansion retreat, and describing preparations for her imminent tour of Asia, the very last stop on her two-year odyssey  with the colossally successful Red. And how she had just been away with Karlie Kloss and what a "completely awesome" human being she is, and how she wanted the chopped chicken salad ("without the tomatoes"). Was the planned surprise simply that we were going to share lunch? Did she want to start talking about the new album? "Oh," she hushed, suddenly aware of neighbouring diners, "maybe we should just talk about that afterwards, at my house." Surprise!

A chopped salad (sans tomato) and a short walk back to hers, and Swift and I stood alone in her  newishly acquired double-storey downtown apartment, a lofty, bright living space she bought from the  film director Peter Jackson. The property is big, and even though her brother, Austin, who is currently studying film, lives across the hall, its stillness chimed loudly of single occupancy. "So," smiled the gracious hostess. "Do you want the grand tour?"
Swift set off, clopping down a hallway lined with black-and-white portraits of her "best friends", which were shot by her on a camera with "fancy filters" and mounted in simple black frames. Here were Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff in Rhode Island; Kloss in Big Sur; her "perfect tourmate" and fellow musician Ed Sheeran goofing around; and Britney, a friend from way back when Swift was a countryloving outcast in Pennsylvania, singing the national anthem at local ball games, wearing cowboy boots and an awkward smile. Britney now works in insurance; another friend is a swimming instructor. Is it possible to stay close when your lives have  taken such different roads? "Of course," Swift shrugged. "We don't talk about our careers. We just talk about girl stuff."
The decorative mood chez T-Swizzle was American Classic - super-sized and supercomfortable,  with lots of wood, deep, velvety dark armchairs, a pool table and a Steinway grand piano lined with Polaroids from a recent house party. It also featured lots of nooks in which to showcase all those  Grammy awards (seven), American Music awards (15), Billboard awards (12) and Country Music  Association awards (11). (Swift was also the first woman, and only the second person, to be awarded  the Country Music Association Pinnacle Award, but I couldn't identify it in situ.)
Swift's a proud homemaker - which is just as well because she has three of them (in addition to the beach house, there is a place in Nashville). "I love shopping for furniture," she said, leading me from one immaculately cosy room to the next, each burning a fug of Jo Malone's Pomegranate Noir and furnished with fabric-covered letters bearing the initials TS - lest we forgot where we were. "I got these at Liberty," she said, showing off two flower-patterned armchairs she picked up the last  time she was in Britain. "And I got that at Anthropologie." She motioned towards a French antique-style bed in one of the guest rooms. A treasured memento hung over its headboard, a signed Oscar de la Renta sketch of the Met Ball gown she wore last spring: "the most beautiful dress I ever wore". Beside the bed hung a rail of vintage Victorian nightwear: "I keep it so that when my girlfriends come over, we can all dress up," she explained. If Swift were to give up music, she has a fabulous future in the hospitality industry: the other guest room boasted an in-built snack unit - bountifully stocked with midnight-feasting fare. "I was thinking, when people come to stay, it would be cool if they had their own mini-bar. Like you have in a hotel."
In the kitchen - huge, white and lined with glass-fronted cupboards boasting all manner of baking-related paraphernalia and decorative enamelware - her cat Meredith slunk around a sink set within a huge, marble-topped workstation. Meredith, named after Meredith Grey from Grey's Anatomy (and who has since been joined by a new kitten, Olivia Benson, named after the lead in Law and Order: SVU), is an aquaphile. "She's obsessed," explained Swift, turning on the tap to emit a trickle of running water, which the cat greedily  started lapping. "She'd do that for hours," said Swift, transfixed. "It's her favourite thing." As we exited, I felt a mild alarm about who would switch off the running water, or snuff the many burning candles.  But, just as an invisible detail of security emerged when we left the restaurant to protect Swift from "crazy fans who want to tie me up in their basement", I imagine there exists a similarly protective domestic guard to prevent flooding and house fires.
Up the stairs, through her bedroom (grown-up pink tones, floral bedspread, a copy of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by the bed, partially read but much admired), and we stepped on to a roof terrace, decked in wood and bearing signs of horticultural promise. "I put these herbs in last week," said Swift waving towards a few pots, "but  I think I've killed them." Then she busied away, setting up a small encampment of cushions and blankets on which to chat more. She kicked off her shoes and hugged a cushion to her chest, a gesture so comfortably familiar and sorority-cute I half expected her to offer me a pair of vintage pyjamas and start painting my nails. But this is the essence of Swift's magic. She may be 24, and one of most successful recording artists in the world, and live an exceptionally gilded existence, and have a slew of celebrity exes, and a career that she set upon at the ludicrously precocious age of nine, but she's never stopped seeming  like the very best girlfriend you could ever have - a girl next door, BFF, older sister and agony aunt all rolled into one. And even if being sisterly and charming and cake-baking is part of an elaborately staged act, she's mind-blowingly good at it. Whenever I've met her she's been nothing other than genuinely warm and sweet.

Alexa Chung

"She seems like one of the girls - if the girls were multi-Grammy-winning multimillionaires under the age of 25," Alexa Chung told me. "Whenever I've met  her she's been nothing other than genuinely warm and sweet". At the Met Ball, when other women were clawing their way to the front of the queue for Rihanna's afterparty, Swift started a counter campaign, inviting girls she met in the bathroom to her house for a pizza party. I chose Rihanna's shindig and spent the entire night wondering what kind of heartbreak chat I was missing out on at the other do." Credit to Vogue.
To be continued...