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"   Houston Street, though long one of lower Manhattan&amp;#039;s most important thoroughfares, has also been one of its biggest eyesores. Now the street is getting a makeover, complete with a landscaped median and several handsome new buildings in place of parking lots and service stations. One of those buildings has just 15 units, including this 2,400-square-foot apartment, home to a young bachelor who works on Wall Street. The apartment came with better-than-average kitchen appliances and bathroom fixtures, courtesy of the developer. So instead of rushing to redo the place, the homeowner decided to live for a year or so with his own furniture while figuring out what he liked and didn&amp;#039;t like about the spaces. But when he visited a downstairs neighbor, who had hired Shamir Shah to redo his apartment, he knew he was ready to renovate. Raised in London and Paris, the client collects contemporary art, much of it from Asia, and he wanted the apartment to reflect his international perspective. Shah, who was born in Kenya to parents of Indian descent, is known for interiors that wed domestic comfort and worldly sophistication. During a nine-month renovation, Shah left no surface untouched. He created &amp;quot;bespoke&amp;quot; details like a dining room ceiling composed of round rice-paper shades in varying sizes and heights on a bronze armature, suggesting a collection of Chinese lanterns or the stylized clouds of a Japanese woodblock print. Asked how many shades there are altogether, the owner answers 31 -- and he knows, he says, because he has to change the lightbulbs. Not that he&amp;#039;s complaining. Shah, he says, gave him a home that embraces the world while standing squarely in Manhattan. Since the client eats out nearly every night, there was no great need for a formal dining room. Instead, Shah turned a 20-by-40-foot space formed by combining the living room and the apartment&amp;#039;s third bedroom into a posh lounge (with seating for 25 and a sofa facing a TV where the dining table might have been). For a smaller dining room that the owner can use &amp;quot;in a pinch,&amp;quot; Shah took over a square foyer, which he opened up by replacing a solid wall with shelves that allow sunlight to reach the once-dark space. One room Shah planned to leave untouched was the kitchen, which had been installed by the developer only a year before. &amp;quot;The environmentalist in me thought it would be a horrible waste to tear everything out,&amp;quot; he says. But when the client saw the plans for the rest of the apartment, he thought the &amp;quot;builder kitchen&amp;quot; would look cheesy alongside Shah&amp;#039;s carefully considered interiors. He had Shah design a replacement kitchen (though, luckily for the environment, one that reused the existing appliances). The client&amp;#039;s informal approach to entertaining at home meant there was no need for a wall between the living room and the new kitchen; the counter serves as a bar when he has guests. At the same time, Shah wanted to make sure the kitchen didn&amp;#039;t compete with the light-and-art-filled living room. He did that by choosing dark oak paneling for the kitchen walls and deep-green marble for its counter surfaces. He also specified reflective surfaces, including &amp;quot;high-gloss auto body lacquer&amp;quot; for the upper cabinets and \u00BD-inch glass tiles for the backsplash. The idea was to dematerialize the kitchen, allowing it to hide in plain sight. As laid out by the developer, the apartment had three small bathrooms, plus a laundry room in an oddly prominent location. Shah&amp;#039;s client wanted a spacious master bathroom, which was achieved by converting one of the two small bathrooms and the laundry room into a single space. (Shah created a new, smaller laundry room in what had been a hall closet.) With a bigger bathroom to maneuver in, the owner could have a shower that wouldn&amp;#039;t feel confining. Shah installed a &amp;quot;deluge&amp;quot; shower head in the ceiling of the wet area (above) -- no shower curtains or glass enclosure required. The drain is in the middle of the floor. (The tub, which the client hardly ever uses, is an investment, he says, in a future that could include marriage.) Once he had changed the room&amp;#039;s configuration, Shah tackled its aesthetics. He turned the bathroom from developer&amp;#039;s standard -- in which fixtures feel tacked on -- to integrated composition. He did that by limiting his palette to the dark brown of the vanity cabinet and tile walls, the beige of the travertine slabs that enclose the tub and countertop, and the putty color of the custom plaster walls flanking the vanity. He also pulled the room together by installing built-ins in place of disparate accessories. Mirrors, vertical strips of lighting and medicine cabinets are incorporated into a single, bronze-framed unit above the vanity in the master bathroom. It also helps that Shah chose the smallest possible ceiling fixtures (the apertures are about two inches across) and positioned them so that the ceiling feels as carefully designed as any other surface in the room. The balance of textures and colors creates a room that is absolutely unique. If you&amp;#039;re looking for a place to sleep soundly, you couldn&amp;#039;t do better than this bedroom. Two prerequisites -- darkness and quiet -- are both addressed in the design. Wood blinds (controlled electrically, because raising and lowering them all by hand would be too much of a chore) and wool drapes with a blackout lining provide darkness. As for quiet, the owner was lucky that the developer had installed soundproofing windows (which succeed even when taxi drivers&amp;#039; tempers flare six floors below). Whatever noises remain -- the ticking of a clock? -- are absorbed into padded surfaces, including the cashmere carpet and the headboard of woven horsehair (part of a bed custom-designed by Shah). Then there are the walls, one upholstered in Great Plains silk from Holly Hunt, the others swathed in grasscloth from Jack Lenor Larsen. But the room is restful in another way: The choice of a few neutral colors (the soft tones of the Frette bed linens, the beige of the painted walls) makes the entire composition calming. Of course, in Shah&amp;#039;s hands, muted doesn&amp;#039;t equal boring. Instead of going for bright colors, he went for rich textures. Being in the room &amp;quot;is a tactile experience, which is a signature of our work,&amp;quot; he says. Another signature is furniture that draws on the sophistication of the art deco movement. Shah designed the night tables, of high-gloss lacquer framed in bronze, and chose bedside lamps of silver leaf (from New York&amp;#039;s Ochre). Both give off a glamorous glow without making the room any less restful. Says the owner, &amp;quot;You feel like you&amp;#039;re completely apart from the city.&amp;quot; What the Pros Know Few things are as luxurious as a warm floor on a wintry day, says Shah, a fan of radiant floor heating. In wood-frame buildings, where there&amp;#039;s room between the floor joists for plumbing, the usual method is to pipe hot water through polyethylene tubes. Here, in a condo building with concrete slab floors, Shah used an electric system, which consists of heating wires set into a fiberglass mat (picture a room-size electric blanket). Installing the mat requires setting it into a layer of thin-set cement, then covering it with a second layer of cement before installing the finished floor (in this case, tile). Once the mat is in, Shah warns, the contractor has to be careful: Something as simple as installing a door stop in the floor could sever one of the heating cables, which would mean tearing up the floor and starting over. Click here to see the resources. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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