It is a Gilded Age gem full of Old Masters, from Vermeer to Holbein. Now, after a ravishing $300m revamp, it is even more welcoming. Our writer revels in its silk-clad walls and the freshly trickling fountain of its light-filled sculpture court

‘If I could have a pound for every person who’s told me that the Frick is their favourite museum, I’d be able to retire already,” says Axel Rüger, the new director of the New York institution, who has just moved there from leading the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Part of the Frick’s appeal is that it is a great museum that hardly feels like a museum at all. Even more than, say, the Wallace Collection in London – one of the inspirations behind the 5th Avenue landmark – the Frick has the feeling of being someone’s home, its contents selected by a singular eye.

That’s because it was and they were. Both home and eye belonged to one man, the Pennsylvania-born coke and steel magnate Henry Clay Frick, who was rich beyond imagining. It is not, though, a place frozen in time. The collection has doubled in size since his death in 1919. The building, which remained the family home until 1931, was altered and enlarged to convert it into a museum that opened in 1935. Nevertheless, “It has such an intimate feel,” says Rüger. “And there’s also an element of fantasy. People think, ‘What would it be like if I lived here?’”