Billy Cotton, an interior designer for blue-chip artists

Billy Cotton was in his 20s, newly arrived in Manhattan in the early 2000s and coasting on a cocktail of youthful exuberance, weed and amphetamines, when a fire consumed his apartment in Chelsea, and with it, his sense of a future.

The blaze had confirmed his worst fears. “I’d always thought on some level that my life would fall apart,” Cotton said.

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Slowly he picked up the…