<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"View Slideshow\n\nThe Japanese-born, Boston-based architect and designer Maho Abe has noticed that she has recently had an uncanny habit of attracting single male clients who are looking for interiors they inevitably describe as pared down, sleek and functional. \"They come to me asking for everything empty and clean, and I give them that, but I try to give them other, subtler things too,\" she says. \"All practicality and no warmth or elegance is no way to live\u2014even if you are a guy on your own.\"\n\nA recent client of Abe's, the new owner of a spacious if initially quirky Back Bay duplex, fit in with her general profile. A scientist and a venture capitalist, he was a divorced father of three young sons who had acquired 5,000 square feet on the top two floors of a ch\u00E2teau-style mansion, which had been designed in 1899 by Charles Brigham for a copper tycoon. The developer envisioned a traditional four-bedroom layout for the space; the client had a different idea.\n\n\"I wanted a contemporary minimalist interior with Japanese touches that would inspire creativity,\" he says. \"It had to be as open as possible, receptive to my ever-changing art collection, suffused in light, comfortable for family life and yet clearly intended for adult entertaining. And I wanted to retain a sense of surprise: I liked walking into a traditional building with its ornate lobby, then coming upstairs to find the unexpected.\"\n\nAbe rose to, and was thrilled by, the challenges of the space. Because it is at the top of the building, it had a ceiling that broke into various sizes, shapes and slopes, which recalled the designer's native Japan, where tiny rooms are often animated by unusual ceilings. Its top-floor location also allowed her to introduce skylights to bring light into dark parts of the main floor, where the kitchen and dining area serve as a central anchor.\n\nThe rooms downstairs are not conventionally defined. This work is done instead by suggestion, or through the clever use of unusual features or visual games. The entrance, for example, is configured by a movable wall, which evokes for Abe a classic Japanese greeting space but which can be swung open during large parties; the wall also provides the client with further options for displaying his artwork. Another dual-functioning idea of Abe's is the line of five columns, not all of them structural, that delineates a long gallery; flat on one side to display paintings or works on paper, the columns are pierced with niches on the other side to accommodate three-dimensional art. For Abe these gestures make it possible to \"have the open space but not the boredom of the open space.\" \"Phantom\" rooms are one solution; another is to use layering and transparency, both typical of the Japanese houses in which she grew up.\n\nAbe enlivened the interiors through her use of varying materials. The designer and her client both liked limestone, but rather than using only a single shade, she called for a large square of blue limestone in the kitchen area and filled out the rest of the apartment with limestone in a quieter beige tone. She framed the existing and often ornate windows with a second, more contemporary layer of glass bordered in maple, which she stained blue gray to look like metal; her intention wasn't to hide the original fenestration but to treat it as another work of art. And as in most of her projects, she inserted a shock of red, here in a niche, because red \"for us Japanese can be loud or quiet. It can accept any other color. It can be interesting and mysterious at the same time.\"\n\n\"Interesting and mysterious at the same time\" is a fitting encapsulation for Abe's work here\u2014in her deft finessing of the downstairs common areas and in her equally imaginative articulation of the path upstairs and the upstairs itself. The staircase Abe designed consists of floating dark-stained maple risers and a chocolate-colored leather banister, all clad in transparent mesh, an effect she calls (with a laugh) \"very manlike,\" though it might also be seen as very Japanese.\n\nThe top floor has its own masculine, and Japanese, aspects. There's the eight-foot square bed: Set into a well in the floor and centered under a five-foot-square skylight, it evokes a futon. There is the shower: Set under another skylight and largely open to the rest of the room, it has a hint of the Japanese bathhouse to it. And there is the terrace, where the building's past and present come together in provocative layered harmony: Truncated 19th-century turrets rise up over bamboo fencing, which in turn frames a contemporary deck with sleek outdoor furniture, a spa and a barbecue.\n\n\"This is an apartment that can embrace many different kinds of lives at the same time,\" the client says contentedly, \"all of them without a stitch of clutter, as I'd hoped, but both with considerably more beauty than I ever imagined.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/zena-article-112006>