Janis Gillham, 54; commercial architect had vision for interior space

At home, Janis Mones Gillham mixed disparate elements, placing a piece of modern furniture with the kind of design Le Corbusier began creating in the late 1920s next to a Jacobean gateleg table that evoked the early 1600s.

Corporate clients, however, often asked her to take imaginative leaps of a more practical nature, as was the case when she designed a new home for a Boston law firm five years ago.

"We're putting a lot of library books on dense, moveable shelves that cut the square footage of the library in half," she told the Boston Business Journal in August 2002.

A managing partner of CBT/Childs Bertman Tseckares, Mrs. Gillham was director of interior architecture when she retired from the Boston firm in late 2002. She and her husband, Oliver, moved from Newton to the Berkshires, only to return to Newton after she was diagnosed with cancer in 2004. Mrs. Gillham, who was 54, died Wednesday.

"She was interested in how to make major interior spaces into something really important," said her husband, an architect and author. "These are places people are in all day long. It's an environment they have to work in, and she showed how you can get some special art and some special design features into it, too."

Janis Mones was born in Philadelphia, where she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, studying art and architectural history and developed her interest in the field. While completing her undergraduate studies she worked with an antipoverty group in Philadelphia and helped provide drawings and designs that would become low-cost housing and urban rehabilitation projects.

At Harvard University's Graduate School of Design she graduated as one of six women in her class, then began her career at the Boston office of David A. Crane & Partners, where she was among the architects who worked on designs that helped transform the urban landscape of Lowell, her husband said.

"After a couple of years working there, she decided what she really wanted to do was work on commercial interiors," he said, and at CBT she went on to work on major offices in downtown Boston.

She designed during the years when computers revolutionized the workplace, with technology changing both desk configurations and the needs of employees.

"People are finding that they need less space per individual, but they need more communication space," she told the Boston Business Journal in February 2002. "There is less emphasis on status and more on function."

Part of that functionality was that "there's more synergy," she added. "People run into colleagues in the corridor, they talk while they get a cup of coffee, and they decide to work together."

Condensing office space, she said, also provided companies with the latitude to add features such as fitness rooms and quiet rooms where employees could retreat to deal with private matters or work that had to be conducted away from the ears and cubicles of colleagues.

Meanwhile, she didn't set aside her creativity when she left the office each evening.

"She loved to do new things all the time," her husband said. "We'd live in a house a few years and she'd get tired and want to start all over again, redo it, redo the kitchen. It was her passion."

At the end of 2002, the Gillhams retired and moved to Richmond, a few miles west of Lenox in the Berkshires. They lived in a stone cottage on 14 acres that had been part of the old Richmond Iron Works site. A 25-foot-tall furnace stood on the property.

Mrs. Gillham would take long walks through the countryside with her friend Barbara Zheutlin of Great Barrington, "talking about books and the beautiful Berkshires and lives and what to do," Zheutlin said.

The two helped launch Share the Bounty. Now part of the nonprofit Berkshire Grown, the program helps purchase fresh food from local farms and distribute it through area food pantries. Mrs. Gillham created the design on the organization's website at berkshiregrown.org.

"She was very passionate about the Berkshires," Zheutlin said. "And she had positive energy, a positive spirit. She was hopeful."

Less than two years after moving to Richmond, Mrs. Gillham was diagnosed with cancer of the bile duct that metastasized.

In the past two years she and her husband traveled as much as possible, including to Italy, a favorite destination through their 26 years of marriage.

Mrs. Gillham was enamored of "the historical architecture, the landscape, the wonderful people, the buildings - she just loved everything about it, Tuscany in particular," her husband said. "We always seemed to be drawn back to Italy."

In addition to her husband, Mrs. Gillham leaves her mother, Selma Mones of Bala-cynwyd, Pa.; a sister, Andrea Mones of Boston; and a brother, Richard Mones of Aberdeen, Md.

Services are private.