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"VIEW MORE PHOTOS      &amp;quot;It was a labor of love, and a bit of an obsession,&amp;quot; says Maya Lin of the apartment she created for a music company executive and his family on Manhattan&amp;#039;s Upper East Side. Best known as the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., Lin has designed only one other apartment, for the software magnate Peter Norton. Completed in the late 1990s, it was widely lauded for the ingenuity that allowed its rooms to serve multiple functions. After seeing the Norton residence in a magazine, Michael Koch knew he wanted to hire Lin to design his family&amp;#039;s Park Avenue apartment. In a building with only one unit to a floor, the space was roughly a 40-by-100 foot rectangle. Gutting it gave Lin a blank slate on which to create her own geometry\u2014a series of interlocking spaces, where walls are really doors to closets that contain cabinets that contain drawers\u2014which would be complicated enough were not every horizontal and vertical surface covered in the same veneer of American brown elm. By the time Lin was done, the 4,000-square-foot apartment required tens of thousands of square feet of veneer. The presence of so much woodwork (all the veneer came from a single tree) has the paradoxical effect of making the precisely machined rooms seem like part of nature.     VIEW MORE PHOTOS  Lin worked with David Hotson, a Manhattan architect who created the working drawings, and Alan Tanksley, a Manhattan interior designer who helped choose furniture that would add a touch of the handmade to the high-tech interiors. Koch&amp;#039;s wife, Laura, had veto power: With two children on the premises, the architectural exercise also had to work as a family home. However, with so many experts, she says, she never had to exercise it. According to Lin, who admires grand gestures, her goal was to reveal the 100-foot-long Park Avenue side of the apartment as a single surface. That sense of openness would give the apartment the drama of a SoHo loft, despite its uptown location. But the problem with lofts, says Lin, a mother of two (and herself an Upper East Sider), is the lack of privacy that rooms with walls provide. So Lin began to think of ways that the long space could function as one (especially when the family was entertaining) but could also be divided into a series of smaller rooms for everyday living. She began sketching walls that would disappear into other walls, to make the apartment, she says, a kind of &amp;quot;transformer.&amp;quot; In one case, a pocket door nearly as wide as a room glides effortlessly through the space with nothing so pedestrian as a track in the floor or ceiling to guide it. In another case, an entire media wall pivots on a hinge so that the same TV can be seen in either the bedroom or the den. Sensors in the floor know where the wall is\u2014and automatically engage the correct set of speakers. Elsewhere, magnets hidden inside the floorboards lock foldaway furniture into place. Koch&amp;#039;s audio and video equipment is also camouflaged. When he wants to watch TV in the living room, he can push one button to make both a projector and a screen drop out of the ceiling. The panels that hide them are in the photo at the top of this page, but you won&amp;#039;t find them, which is how Lin, Hotson, Tanksley and the Koches wanted it: The apartment is at once a high-tech machine and an extraordinarily serene interior. Michael Koch&amp;#039;s first paying job was at his father&amp;#039;s CD-pressing company in Innsbruck, Austria. After moving to the United States 20 years ago, he founded what is now Koch Entertainment, a company that not only presses records but produces them. That may explain his fascination with both the physical and artistic sides of design. And it helps explain his successful relationship with Lin, the daughter of two professors, who also enjoys both aesthetic and practical challenges. To be able to focus on her art, Lin declines most architectural commissions, and her small studio in SoHo has an unlisted number. When she does accept a design job, she sketches by hand and has a local firm create the working drawings. Her most frequent collaborator has been Hotson (who has also worked with acclaimed Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and British wunderkind David Adjaye), but these days Hotson is focusing on his own design for a modern art museum in Armenia, where he now has an office. Lin has also called on Tanksley before. Here, he helped bring in layers and patterns that would evidence the human touch within a context that was largely determined by Lin (who even arranged the light fixtures in the ceilings). He says, &amp;quot;My job was to get some texture in there.&amp;quot; Without his contribution, Lin says, the apartment &amp;quot;would have had one tone.&amp;quot; Koch praises every member of the design team for their talent and diligence. Paradoxically, what he appreciates most isn&amp;#039;t what is seen, but what isn&amp;#039;t: Just try finding a handle or a vent. Says Koch, of the effort that went into producing such astonishing simplicity, &amp;quot;It isn&amp;#039;t easy to make nothing.&amp;quot; What the Pros Know As designed by Maya Lin, panels had to slide or swing just a hair&amp;#039;s breadth from other panels. Randy Polumbo of 3-D Laboratory had to figure out how to build the apartment, which, he says, is really a giant piece of furniture. It helped that Lin and Hotson designed everything around the width of available flitches of American brown elm veneer. Where the strips of wood are 4 inches wide, the doors stretch to 28 or 32 inches but never 30. And the flitches were ten feet high, so there would never be a horizontal seam. Wood veneer has no top or bottom, which allows some designers to bookmatch it (flipping every second piece, to create the effect of facing pages); Lin&amp;#039;s choice was to allow the pattern to repeat over and over. Where panels have to bear weight, the veneer was applied to sheets of birch plywood; non-load-bearing panels are made of thin layers of MDF over a plastic honeycomb material, which is both extremely stable and extremely light. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elledecor.com/design-decorate/a1092/naturally-perfect-19356/>