Making a loft livable - that is, bringing it down to human scale - is a problem that designers have tried to solve with everything from Modernist sliding steel-and-glass walls to Georgian doorways. But Thomas Jayne, a New York decorator, took a route the redefines the phrase "economy of means." With just four colors of paint, Jayne transformed the 2,000-square-foot SoHo loft that he shares with Rick Ellis, a food stylist and culinary historian, into a series of welcoming "virtual rooms."

Knowing that their building was soon to undergo major renovations, Jayne and Ellis decided to move in only a minimum of their many possessions (which include antique furniture and decorative objects accumulated by the extremely knowledgeable Jayne and Ellis's 5,000 books on American cookery). Alas, their well-edited selection of furnishings - even a massive Victorian bed that belonged to Jayne's great-great-grandparents-practically disappeared in the loft's vast, white space. "I was dwarfed," admits the
6-foot-7 Jayne.

But he knew what to do. Much of this work, as he explains it, is "about organizing spaces with color, as they did in the 18th and 19th centuries." But his approach to the loft also recalls the way 20th-century designers like Charles and Ray Eames used color as floating planes. Jayne applied big rectangles of blue, green, pink and ocher to the walls to define the dining and living areas in the main space and to make the 14-foot-high walls relate to the scale of the furniture in all the rooms. (Even in the bedroom, Jayne added two color blocks to make the massive bed seem, well, more massive.)

Jayne's palette includes colors, like bubble-gum pink and acid green, "that aren't necessarily used in polite decorating," he says. "But we knew we weren't going to live with it forever. Why be tasteful?"