At the annual Armory Show this weekend, VIP status gets you much more than access to the maze of temporary booths lining Piers 90 and 92. Each year, the exhibiting art dealers submit the names of their preferred collectors, and the resulting list totals a few thousand lucky folks. Those individuals then receive a 70-page booklet of events such as special access to museums, galleries, and parties. But the most exclusive gatherings are private tours of spaces New Yorkers hold sacred: their homes.

Starting tomorrow and continuing through Sunday,20 New York collectors and artists will open up their lofts, penthouses, and apartments to groups of VIPs. The hosts include art adviser Mark Fletcher and the head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s, Tobias Meyer, who live on the 66th floor of the Time Warner Center; Susan and Michael Hort, who live in TriBeCa; and Upper West Siders Jerome and Ellen Stern. The artist hosts are William Wegman and David Levinthal. These hosts will welcome groups of 25 to 200 VIPs – who signed up weeks ago – to see what’s hanging where at home.

“I’m always inspired when I see works in people’s homes,” a host, collector, and art dealer, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, said. Ms. Rohatyn will open her private living space on the second floor of her Upper East Side townhouse, as well as the first floor, which is set up as a professional gallery, Salon 94.”It’s very important for collectors to view work in private homes,” she said. “It gives one ideas. It allows one to be experimental … and it also encourages collectors to have their own vision and bring out their own personalities, and not follow a trend.”

This year, collectors Joel and Zoe Dictrow are displaying recent acquisitions of work by Gregory Crewdson and Portia Munson, which means they’ve spent considerable time figuring out where the work fits in their home. “We want each piece to have a dialogue with the other pieces in the room, because sometimes things clash. Sometimes you’ll put a younger artist near our Gerhard Richter, and they’re fighting,” Ms. Dictrow said.

Management consultant George Robertson reshuffles his collection once a year, usually with Armory Show VIP tours of his Chelsea loft as the trigger. “It gives me the excuse to get the energy to move things around and put things up in a major way. It’s the time to really rethink what’s in the apartment,” Mr. Robertson said.

He looks to highlight relatively new and unknown artists and to juxtapose works in an unexpected way. “A private collection is different from a gallery or museum because it’s an eccentric set of choices,” Mr. Robertson said.

On one wall, he displays paintings chronologically by different artists, among them Carroll Dunham, and Francesca DiMattio. The works of art often dictate everything else about the apartment: He moved six years ago, when he discovered a painting he’d bought was too big to hang in his old apartment. (And he has subsequently sold that same painting.)

Does furniture move when he rehangs? “Everything has already moved to make way for art,” he said. And as for cleanup prior to the in-home viewing, Mr. Robertson only removes “clutter of a very personal nature – papers on the tabletop in my home office.”

In fact, he likes to keep it intimate. “Art is one point of connection. So are the rest of the parts of your life – my books, my sheets, my music. Almost everything is a possibility. I don’t want to remove those possibilities.”

Opening up one’s home to strangers can be disconcerting. “Before we did it, we were concerned about people touching things and security issues,” Ms. Dictrow said. But after a few years’ experience, she has found that the people who are invited “are very respectful.”

Mr. Robertson echoed that. “The people who are interested in contemporary art generally know how to be careful around things,” he said.

And it helps around the house, too, according to collector Jerome Stern, a board member of New Museum. “I got my wife to clean up the house,” he said.

Sometimes, though, the guests are more finicky than the hosts. Mr. Stern recalled a VIP carrying an oversize alligator handbag that he feared might knock into some of the African sculptures he had on display. “The woman refused to put the bag down until my wife put a towel down,” he said. “She wouldn’t put it down on the floor.”

Artist David Levinthal, who opens up his studio, enjoys the informal conversations he has with visitors. “Basically it’s an opportunity to introduce some people to not just my work but the whole process. Collectors really enjoy seeing what is essentially the backstage.”

He has a glass case from the 1940s with a number of the toy figures he has used in his work. Does it feel intrusive to have people in his home? “I’m really used to people coming into the space to look at work. I have no problem with it; it’s actually kind of fun. It gives people a chance to see things that I’m collecting for future projects,” he said.

In past years, collectors have included the president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, Agnes Gund, its chairman emeritus, Ronald Lauder, and Yvonne and Leo Villareal.

The flourishing of events around the fair is in part a response to the Art Basel Miami Beach show, which offers a VIP schedule of events that is more than 100 pages long. There’s a big difference, though: The events in Miami help make that new, sunny city culturally significant for a few days. New York, however, is already the center of the art world, so the attitude toward such events is more nonchalant.

Nonetheless, the Armory Show is a good event to organize other gatherings around. It gives both New Yorkers and out-of-towners a once-a-year opportunity to see more of the art world in a concentrated period.

“What we’re trying to do is get as much as possible out of what we have in New York City,” the director of the Armory Show, Katelijne De Backer, said. “In the early years, we really had to reach out and talk to everybody and explain to them what we were doing; now it is turning around. People are coming to us.”

agordon@nysun.com