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"View Slideshow\n\nDesigners usually walk you through their rooms, proudly explaining what they have done with colors, fabrics and furniture. To show off a two-story New York penthouse he and his partner, Peter L. Shelton, had designed, Lee F. Mindel did all that\u2014and a little bit more. Lying flat on his back in the dining area, he pointed up at the all-glass ceiling and, above it, the rich spectacle of storm clouds racing one another across the summer sky. \"Most ceilings are finite,\" he said. \"This one is infinite. In Manhattan you often get stuck indoors. Here you feel as if you're outdoors. Does it get any better?\" No, it doesn't, at least not in the middle of a city of more than eight million.\n\nBut then this is not just any penthouse. Sitting atop a structure of modernistic steel and glass, it bears the distinctive signature of French architect Jean Nouvel. Breaking with New York tradition, Nouvel has wrapped the top floors, including the penthouse, in a brise soleil, a structure of steel louvers, that extends up and over the roof, breaks up the sunshine and incorporates light and shadow into his design. With equal boldness, he has also installed bright strips of colored glass, blue on one side of the building, red on the other, above the building's windows, turning the entire fa\u00E7ade into a giant, Mondrian-inspired painting.\n\nBuying an apartment in such an innovative building was a leap of faith for the owners, an adventurous married couple with grown children. When they signed the contract in 2007, construction was still going on, the brise soleil was not yet in place and plywood covered the penthouse's windows. But the couple liked both Modern architecture and the work of Nouvel, who was soon to receive the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honor. \"So we decided to take the risk,\" says the wife. \"Now we feel privileged to live here.\"\n\nBut the layout of the penthouse, cut up into four bedrooms for a large family, did not match Nouvel's grand scheme or their own needs. \"Our kids are grown, and we don't need a lot of bedrooms,\" says the wife. \"We wanted something more open, something that would leave the views unobstructed.\" That was when they called in the obstruction removers, the team of Shelton and Mindel. \"We liked the way they open up spaces,\" she says, \"and we liked their soothing and comfortable color palette.\"\n\nArchitects Shelton and Mindel took out almost everything that had been there. On the first floor they put the public rooms: the kitchen and dining area, which has the double-height glass ceiling, the living area and lounge and, tucked away in a corner, a small guest room. Long and narrow, the floor is open, like a loft, so that the eye can travel unimpeded from one end to the other. \"Jean Nouvel established the vocabulary, and we responded in the same language,\" says Mindel. \"We distilled the space to its essence.\"\n\nOn the second floor, the architects placed the master suite and the media room. In the original plan a thin balcony overlooked the dining area and kitchen. \"Multiuseless\" is how Mindel describes it, and he and Shelton extended the floor to create a small office over the kitchen. Sitting side-by-side at their computers, the couple can look down at the dining area, out at the city and up to the sky. \"The office is now a lookout tower,\" says Mindel, \"like an observation deck at an airport.\"\n\nAbove the office they added a rectangular yellow plane, their response to the blue strips in Nouvel's glass fa\u00E7ade. \"The blue is better because of the yellow,\" says Mindel, \"and the yellow is better because of the blue.\" There is a similar relationship between the office and the dining area below. Seen from above, the dining area composition looks like a tulip\u2014six high-backed green chairs circling a round table, like petals around the center of a flower.\n\nEverything in the apartment, in fact, relates to everything else, and each item is there for a reason. \"An intelligent machine,\" Mindel calls that steel-and-glass aerie high above the streets of SoHo. \"You can ask each component, What are you doing here?' And each component can give you an answer. I can't imagine anything that's here not being here\u2014or anything added that isn't here.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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