Where low-hanging cabinets once blocked easy conversation, as well as views of Puget Sound, a high, walnut counter now encourages perching to kibitz with the cooks when Chuck and Miho Pell entertain. A long dining table stands in the space formerly taken by a rickety porch and converted to an energy-saving sun room.

An array of miniature flag standards are signs of a Japanese tradition in which each firehouse sets its own design to flutter in the wind.

MIHO PELL remembers watching what her mother could do with a single daikon and just one additional ingredient - how the tangy radish might appear raw in a salad with napa cabbage, float in a clear broth, or add snap to a bowl of steamed rice. "With just two ingredients, she came up with four different things," Miho says, shaking her head in reminiscent amazement, an ocean and five decades away from those early memories.

Working in the kitchen of the West Seattle home she shares with husband Chuck Pell, Miho often produces meals of deceptive simplicity as she wields a set of wickedly sharp Japanese knives. But there are, too, the complex traditional dishes she assembles each New Year's, as well as a wide-ranging Chinese cuisine, many savory Italian recipes, and plenty of Northwest noshes when devotees of the Seattle Classic Guitar Society drop by in droves.

Creating a welcoming place for everything from a peaceful dinner tete a tete to a post-concert reception was at the heart of remodeling the Pells launched in the mid-1990s. With Seattle architect Tom Roth, the couple transformed a cramped kitchen, where one crouched to make eye contact beneath suspended cupboards, into a place where the cooks may stand at a large central island, or at the gas range, and face their guests across a gleaming walnut serving bar.

Before the major overhaul, the Pells had been steadily at work on the late-1950s Northwest-style house virtually from the moment they signed the closing papers in 1979.

"We moved in here," Chuck begins.

"And then we moved out," Miho continues with a rueful laugh.

Trusting that "architect-designed" also meant high-quality materials, the couple had planned to rip up shag carpeting and replace it with oak flooring. They accomplished that goal only after spending hours hammering stabilizing nails into a cheap and creaky subfloor.

Another transformation: In replacing rattling, drafty single-pane windows with larger double-paned, straight-grain-fir casements throughout the house, the Pells came to own a relatively modest house with a million-dollar view.

At one time, high windows barely deeper than clerestories spread across the southern exposure of the house on its hillside site. Now, the view from the master bedroom, living room, sun room and kitchen takes in the full sweep of Puget Sound and the picturesque operations of the Fauntleroy ferry dock.

A similar, if more intimate, change has brought the outdoors inside on the north side of the house, where part of a previous courtyard has been enclosed to serve as a dinette area. A wide, bench-like skirting resembling a Japanese engawa now steps down to a deck about 16 feet square; around it cluster a black pine, an ornamental maple and several camellias.

Since the Pells are ardent birders, they especially enjoy how the deck and dinette areas provide a connection to the wildlife of the quiet, wooded setting. On a winter's day, one may watch iridescent Anna's hummingbirds sipping delicately from hanging feeders, laugh at the antics of a flock of band-tailed pigeons on a pole feeder, or listen to the rattle of a pileated woodpecker excavating a meal on a madrona snag left standing expressly for his pleasure.

This serene environment is a far cry from the Yokohama business college where the Pells met in 1959. Miho, dreading the looming confinement of an arranged marriage, had been taking courses to prepare herself for eventual flight. Then, in an English class taught by the young Chuck Pell, she found herself developing fluency in more than one new language. After they left Japan in 1961, the couple spent several lean student years in Chicago before Chuck and his masters in avionics engineering attracted the attention of Boeing, which brought them to the Pacific Northwest.

Today throughout their home are many reminders of Miho's heritage and their yearly visits to Japan. Shoji screens serve as dividers between a home office and the living room. A set of miniature firehouse light standards, tiny Sumo wrestler figurines and a blue-toned print of Mount Fuji hang in the stairwell to the downstairs area above a suspended Ainu kimono in blue and white.

Just as with their cooking, however, the Pells strike an international note in the decorative aspect of their gradually evolving Northwest house. There's the big platter from Austria that Miho recalls carrying onto a plane atop her head, the tiny Hopi bowl from a visit to the American Southwest, and the bright enameled plate they found in Spain. Beside the fireplace there's a fine example of the couple's love of frugal festivity: an oval brass tub brimming with wine bottle corks, ready for fire starting on a winter's eve.

Karen Mathieson is a writer and musician who lives in West Seattle.