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As you like it

Folding panels and sliding furniture let these loft owners reconfigure their space to suit the occasion.

When Jane and Joe Carpineto bought their 2,200-square-foot loft in Boston"s Leather District, near South Station, it was a "big vanilla box," says Jane.

In other words, it was the standard brick-factory-to-condominium-loft conversion. It had original wood floors, a few brick walls, big windows, and a high ceiling. The kitchen was the typical high-end loft kitchen: birch cabinets, stainless-steel appliances, and granite counter tops. Everything was in the big open area except for a long entry hall, a separate master bedroom, and two baths.

The problem, Joe says, was how to create intimate spaces while keeping the open feeling. "We didn't want to entertain our friends in a big space that felt like an aircraft hangar," says Joe, a sculptor who works in metal. "We wanted to create small areas without using any permanent walls."

The answer was a combination of lighting, furniture arrangement, and, for the crowning touch, a steel room divider that Joe made in his Waltham studio.

The divider is relocated from time to time, but for now it is fixed to the wall near the dining area. It is 6 feet high, with four 3-foot-wide steel panels hinged together, and it moves on industrial-looking wheels. "If we're having a dinner party, we pull this out to enclose the space. It makes it feel like we're in a small room," Joe says.

The couple knows all about small spaces. They moved to the loft from a Back Bay home that was "chopped up into little rooms," says Jane, who is the author of five books, including On the Vineyard. Well, maybe not exactly little, she amends. It was a Victorian-era Back Bay row house, and some of the main rooms were large. But those were nothing compared to the openness of loft living, she says. "This is raw space. It leaves you with the opportunity to invent whatever you want and to change it whenever you want."

To keep the layout fluid, the couple designed a birch sideboard with wheels and several tables attached to metal tracks that run along the walls. That way, if they need the sideboard close to the dining table for serving at a dinner party, or if they want to move the sitting area to a new spot, it can be done with a push. "We couldn't do that in the Back Bay. Everything was set in place," Jane says.

The high, vaulted ceiling is spray-painted white, and mini-spotlights are mounted to illuminate certain areas at night. "You don't need walls to create a small-room feeling. You can do that with light," says Joe. He switches on a light, and the front of the loft, arranged as the living room, is suddenly stage-lighted with a soft glow.

Joe put his own personal stamp on the kitchen, fabricating a stainless-steel center island in a shape that is somewhere between a teardrop and a crescent. "Some people say it's a little bit like the Nike symbol," says Joe. On one side of the island are three burnished-steel stools. "We went all over Boston looking for the right stools. We finally found them in Manhattan, in Greenwich Village," says Jane.

At the back end of the main loft area, the couple installed a three-quarter-height wall. "It began as an office space, but we also needed a guest room for when our children come to visit," says Jane (the couple have two daughters in their 20s). Jane wants to finish the divider with glass panels above, completely shutting it off from the main area. Joe wants to leave it "as is" - meaning as he designed it. "We haven't decided," says Jane.

In the master bedroom and bath, the couple continued the industrial theme by using lots of stainless steel. The gooseneck lamps on each side of the bed are made of steel, and all the fixtures in the bath are steel, including the towel racks - steel cables attached to steel anchors.

The entry hall is a long, narrow space with a built-in optical illusion - the width of the hall remains the same, but one wall holds three shelves that taper outward, from nothing at the front door to about 12 inches wide at the door to the main room. "it's meant to give the feeling of being catapulted into the open space," says Jane. "It works because your eyes follow the shelves as they widen, and then you suddenly pass through the door into the big room."

But there's a drawback. "They only create that feeling if they're empty. It doesn't work if they are cluttered," says Jane. "So we have to keep them clear. Or we try."