Pied-à-Pair

For their new apartment, a couple wanted built-in shelves to display items gathered from their world travels. A living room corner is furnished with a Robert James Collection wood-and-metal coffee table, a rounded Verellen club chair, and a three-legged walnut side table from Caste.

To save space and to keep the open living area flexible in function, the designer fashioned a custom banquette on one side of a Skram pedestal table.

Elements in the foyer include a teardrop-shaped Apparatus sconce and an Erden runner with inlaid-brass detailing.

A trip to the Cumar showroom resulted in the powder room’s heavily veined marble countertop.

A guest room doubles as a living space. A woven silk flatweave area rug serves as the base for a Poltrona Frau ottoman and lounge chair and a black Gregorius Pineo side table.

Cabinetry on the left opens to reveal a desk topped with a bronze task lamp from Juniper. The Henge desk pouf swivels.

The custom bed in the primary suite occupies its own niche. An Audo swivel chair paired with an O&G drink drop makes for a comfy place to perch.

A freestanding tub is positioned to maximize city views; the teak stools are from Serena & Lily.

Taking Notes

Getting this apartment right literally required hitting the right notes. While the empty-nester couple, relocating from a big Victorian house in Brookline, Massachusetts, to a new thirty-second-floor, two-bedroom Back Bay apartment, were open to design ideas, there was a caveat. “They had one big ask: find space for our baby grand piano,” recalls interior designer Rebecca Rivers, who worked in concert with architect David Tabenken, both from Boston design firm Hacin.

Despite a spacious layout in the Raffles Residences, wheeling in a piano meant reconfiguring the floor plan. Tabenken and Rivers devised an idea to take down a wall separating the living/dining area from a guest bedroom. In place of drywall, they installed a two-panel glass door, composed of smokey bronze panes. When closed, the room functions as a bedroom; when retracted, the space melds effortlessly with the living areas. Not only can the husband and wife use the space as a music room, they can also work there at a desk hidden by a pair of doors, while an adjacent tripart series of panels conceals a Murphy bed.

Although the couple left a large residence filled with years of memories, they were content to pivot aesthetically, notably with sinuously shaped contemporary furnishings, a foil, too, to the otherwise hard edges of the building’s geometry. Having lived and traveled all over the world, the couple sought to incorporate artifacts and artworks gathered from their wanderings. Also, as Rivers emphasizes, they wanted significant expanses of anigre, an African hardwood that evokes the homeowners’ prior lives in South Africa. The wood is first glimpsed in the entry, with anigre paneling serving as a backdrop to an astonishingly original console that appears to float.

“This was my first architectural project in a high-rise,” admits Tabenken, “and it was a joy to work on because of the simplicity of the solutions, the overall concept, and because the clients were so easy to work with—decisive, open-minded people.”

Project Team
Architecture and interior design: Hacin
Builder: The Lagassé Group

Photography by Joyelle West

Interior designer Leslie Fine chose Rain Forest Brown polished marble from Cumar as a feature wall; that’s parchment paper under glass surrounding the TV. Swivel chairs by the windows can pivot to take in the view or to watch Netflix.

A Harris Rubin side table sits beside one of the Anees Furniture & Design swivel chairs.

Fine prefers to use vinyl cushions in a kitchen because they’re stain resistant and wipe clean but still look like leather. She positioned three stools from Artistic Frame at the counter, whose marble surface is underlit to create a glowing, ethereal effect.

To make room for a king-size bed, a walk-in closet was eliminated in favor of a see-through unit from Molteni&C. Fine designed the upholstered floor-to-ceiling headboard.

A spacious shower features French doors and a recessed light that fosters a serene mood.

Scaling New Heights

Even though the homeowner was aware that his one-bedroom apartment, fifty-eight floors above Boston Harbor, was compact, he knew what he wanted interior designer Leslie Fine to accomplish. “I wanted my small apartment to feel mighty,” he says.

He also knew Fine could tackle the task. The duo had previously worked together to transform his other home, a three-bedroom apartment located right next door to the new unit.

“Both he and I wanted to make this apartment, to be used as a pied-à-terre, look and feel very different from the other unit,” says Fine. A stone feature wall in the living room immediately set the tone and distinguished the apartment from its neighbor’s more traditional design scheme. When Fine visited Cumar in nearby Everett with the homeowner and showed him a slab of dark marble with intriguing rust and gray veining, he recalls being struck by its patterns and hues. “I just couldn’t believe it when I saw it,” he says.

Fine chose a white marble, noted for its crystalline, translucent quality, for the kitchen. The countertop and backsplash are further enhanced by cove and underlighting—another feat by lighting designer Barbara Bouyea—that lends the utilitarian space an ethereal effect.

Fine conceded that, even in luxury buildings such as Millennium Tower, “you’re confronted with basically unembellished white boxes.” To counter that, she sought out shapely furniture and accessories. In the living room, for instance, she chose an oval rug, curvaceous chairs and sofa, and a sinuous coffee table.

“I made things rounded to offset the squared-off lines of the apartment,” Fine says, pointing also to the tubular-shaped lamps on a Jonathan Browning Studios chandelier in the bedroom.

Also in the bedroom, often reserved for one of the homeowner’s visiting children, Fine eliminated a clumsy walk-in closet in favor of a sleek see-through storage system from Molteni&C. “What talented people like Leslie have taught me,” says the homeowner, “is to leave creative people alone to be creative in all the ways that they know how to be.”

Project Team
Interior design: Leslie Fine Interiors
Builder: FBN Construction

Photography by Michael J. Lee
Styling by Julia Heffelfinger