By JULIET CHUNG

Brookline, Mass.

First-time visitors might do a double-take when approaching Harvey Makadon and Ray Powrie’s Dutch Colonial: The couple’s renovated home is fronted by twin, side-by-side entrances.

Upon closer inspection, though, only one is an actual door; the other is a large window that looks like the door. (A screen door, doormat and hanging overhead light offer clues about which is which.) Once inside, visitors are greeted by mirror-image staircases, both leading to the second floor.

“We like that sort of humor,” said Dr. Powrie, 48, an internist and professor at Brown University’s medical school. He and his partner Dr. Makadon, a 64-year-old internist and clinical professor at Harvard Medical School, added that the twin entrances were also a way of maintaining the modest character and scale of their 3,000-square-foot, four-bedroom brick-and-clapboard home.

Originally two side-by-side duplexes built as servants’ quarters for a nearby estate, their newly combined house remains modest in comparison to the sprawling mansions in Brookline’s Chestnut Hill neighborhood. Owners in the area include New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and Larry Lucchino, chief executive of the Boston Red Sox. A six-bedroom, 3,800-square-foot Colonial house on the next block is on the market for $3.3 million.

With twin entrances, the home of two Massachusetts doctors celebrates its historical origins as two side-by-side duplexes. Juliet Chung gives us a tour on Lunch Break.

Dr. Makadon had lived in his half of the house since the early 1980s. When the longtime neighbor next door said she was moving out, the couple made an offer; the duplex never hit the market. They closed on her half of the house for $600,000 in 2006. The roughly eight-month renovation, completed in 2007 for an additional $600,000, turned the couple’s 1,700-square-foot, two-bedroom duplex into a home nearly twice as big, with two new guest rooms, an additional bathroom and powder room and more space for the study and public living spaces downstairs.

Most renovations that involve taking over an adjoining apartment focus on disguising the blended nature of the space—not emphasizing the fact. Maryann Thompson, the couple’s Cambridge, Mass.-based architect, said the dualistic approach, which she presented to the couple along with options to combine the entrances and staircases, immediately suggested itself as a way of playfully referencing the home’s history.

That sense of playfulness peeks through the rest of the home, where Ms. Thompson knitted together the units in a more conventional manner. A foyer in the front and a kitchen in the back on the ground floor connect the two former duplexes. Upstairs, which houses three bedrooms and two baths, an expanded study does the same.

Ms. Thompson also opened up the home’s interiors by replacing sections of the building’s exterior brick walls with mahogany-framed panels of floor-to-ceiling glass. Glass walls flank an informal dining nook off the kitchen that looks out onto an ipe wood deck and a garden dotted with Japanese maples and columnar beeches. Works by artists including Nan Goldin and Lucian Freud mix with pottery and statues the couple picked up on their travels.

A native of the Philadelphia suburbs who came to Boston for his internal medicine residency, Dr. Makadon bought his half of the house in 1983 because he loved the neighborhood and location, a quick commute to the Boston hospitals where he worked. When he bought it, the duplex had one bath, with no bathroom or closet space on the ground floor.

“It was a total wreck,” he said, recalling that the roof had holes. Working with an architect friend, Stuart Lesser, soon after moving in, he updated the bath and turned three bedrooms into a study, bedroom and closet space.

In 1991, Dr. Makadon and Mr. Lesser worked together again to add a large living room, deck and bathroom on the ground floor, plus a makeshift guest bedroom, screened porch and bathroom in the walkout basement. Dr. Powrie, a Canadian whom Dr. Makadon met that same year at a medical conference, moved in shortly later. “I added the addition, and then Ray,” Dr. Makadon said. “Ray gradually moved in. It was like, all of a sudden, he was here.”

Their latest remodel was their bid to create a home the next owner might not tear down, the couple said. They liked the experience so much, they worked with Ms. Thompson to design and build a modern, four-bedroom vacation house in Cape Cod, with lots of glass and deck space.

The couple said they’re now done with any major renovations, though they don’t count out small projects. “I love this house,” Dr. Makadon said. “I can’t imagine ever leaving a house like this.”

Write to Juliet Chung at juliet.chung@wsj.com

The Harley-Davidson brand could make you think of ’70s counterculture movie “Easy Rider,” the bearded rock band ZZ Top, or the recent trend that has seen aging executives become the biggest buyers of the motorbikes.

There is no doubt, though, that the brand is usually associated with long road trips on the wide open freeways of North America.

Harley-Davidson Motor Co.

David Foley

David Foley, Harley-Davidson Motor Co.’s Asia-Pacific chief, faces some challenges bringing that taste of Americana to this region: Regulations can make it difficult to import the bikes, there’s competition from local motorbike brands with loyal followings, safe roads suitable for long cruising rides can be tough to find, and securing a rider’s license can be difficult too.

Harley-Davidson has been selling motorbikes in the Asian-Pacific region since the early 20th century—the Milwaukee-based company began distributing its bikes in Japan in 1908 and in Australia in 1917. It only much more recently moved into China and India, opening dealerships in the two emerging Asian giants in 2005 and 2010, respectively.

Mr. Foley opened a new regional headquarters in Singapore in May. He spoke to The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Chow. The following interview has been edited.

WSJ: Where is the growth in Asia?

Mr. Foley: We’re expecting sales outside of the U.S. to exceed 40% of the total by 2014 [compared with 35% last year]. Asia’s a big market for us. In Asia-Pacific, we’ve a quarter-million of motorcycles in operation, which is approximately 9.6% of the global total. In 2007, it made up just about 7% of the global total.

Japan is one of our biggest markets outside of the U.S. It accounts for 5% of our volume. It’s got a real established riding culture and motorcycle industry. Same with Australia. Leisure riding there is very well established. The rest of the markets [in Asia] vary. In many emerging markets, we’re developing the market we’re trying to capture. To many of them, the two-wheel [mode of transportation] is usually seen as utilitarian.

WSJ: Who’s buying in Asia?

Mr. Foley: It varies by market. In emerging markets, you have higher-net-worth individuals riding, and it skews younger than the U.S. But also, we’re seeing a large increase in female riders there too.

WSJ: How do you introduce the culture of leisure riding to new markets?

Mr. Foley: We have active programs for demonstration rides. We also do “Garage Parties”—a women-only setting to learn about Harley products along with other women. We’ve also got new marketing tools like “Jumpstart,” where potential customers can try riding a bike, revving the engine and changing gears, mounted on a stationary stand. It’s a big part of the first-hand experience of the look and feel of the product without having to go into traffic.

WSJ: How do the laws and regulations in Asia affect growth?

Mr. Foley: First, it’s importation, which deals with everything from trade rules to compliance. Another area is restriction on licensing. In Singapore, for example, it can take 3.5 years to operate a heavy-duty motorcycle. And thirdly, there are riding bans. In certain cities in China and other parts of Asia there are bans where they don’t allow the use of motorcycles.

We have worked directly with government officials on traffic management issues in the past.

WSJ: Are there enough good roads for Harley-Davidson riders in Asia?

Mr. Foley: It’s certainly a factor. Road quality will vary. The company, through Harley owner’s clubs, really makes an effort to find high-quality roads that are often scenic rides. Part of the culture among our customers is to find these roads and for riders to tell each other.

WSJ: What has been your experience in India?

Mr. Foley: India has a very large motorcycle industry. There’s somewhat of a motorcycle culture that already exists there. We’re trying to further develop the heavy-duty leisure segment. We’ve established five dealerships in the market and we’re continuing to grow each month.

Even though it has a large motorcycle market, the heavyweight market—bikes with engines over 500cc—is not very well established. But having a motorcycle culture is hugely important. A big part of motorcycling is being comfortable with the product and with riding.

WSJ: The annual Harley-Davidson rally in Sturgis, S.D., attracts about half a million visitors every August. Will we see anything similar in Asia?

Mr. Foley: In each of our markets, there are annual HOG [Harley Owner Group] rallies, and we sponsor or get involved with them. Is there a Sturgis? It’s hard to say. We get riders from Asia who go to those events [in the U.S.] every year, but it’s not the only thing they do. We just had a group from Malaysia that we took to Milwaukee and saw the factory and met some of the Davidson family. They really got involved with the brand in a unique way.

By NAT HENTOFF

In May 2009, I received an email message to call someone I didn’t know: “I’m Ehsan from northern Iran.” He wanted my permission to translate into Persian and publish “Jazz: New Perspectives on the History of Jazz,” a book I edited with Albert McCarthy in 1974. Then, last year he asked to do the same with “At the Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene,” which I had just published. I gave my enthusiastic assent to both requests. He had discovered my books in one of the private libraries featuring prohibited materials maintained by private citizens in Iran, and had found out how to contact me via a Facebook page set up for me by one of my children.

As Ehsan had expected, Iran’s censors forbade publication of the first book. And when he found a copy of the second one on the Internet in a PBS edition and printed it out by himself, he didn’t, as is required by law, let the censors know because, as he said, “they’d accuse me of being paid by the West to propagandize Western values.”

Ehsan is Ehsan Khoshbakht, 29, a young Iranian dissident and jazz aficionado whose blog, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” is dedicated to spreading the jazz gospel as a voice for freedom inside his native country, where certain types of music and other arts are prohibited. Mr. Khoshbakht’s initial contact with me blossomed into a continuing dialogue via the Internet and telephone in the years since. In our conversations, I learned how this young man became so determined a member of what he calls “the jazz family,” even under a dictatorship as closed to this music as Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia were.

Mr. Khoshbakht says he named his blog (which can be found at ehsankhoshbakht.blogspot.com) after the famous Duke Ellington composition because, “I love Duke, and I see jazz as that train. Living in Iran, the only notion I had of freedom was listening to these jazz people, especially Duke Ellington.”

“On the Web,” he continued, “I read passages from your books and play music by the players you write about. Billie Holiday, Jo Jones who plays like the wind, Charlie Mingus and his cry for freedom. I was born late so I lost the chance of hearing Duke, Basie, Thelonious in person. But in your books, I see you as one of those people.”

That beats any award I’ve ever received.

Mr. Khoshbakht was born in 1982, three years after the revolution, in a small town in northeast Iran. In 1996, his family moved to the religious city of Masshhad, which “in the gloomy days of post-Revolution Iran was possibly the most impossible place to live in,” he says. “Restrictions on arts and entertainment were suffocating throughout the country. No screening of foreign films. No Western music. But in Masshhad, there was no music of any kind, even Iranian traditional and folk music.”

Then, in 1998 Mr. Khoshbakht discovered jazz when he came across a compilation cassette. “What changed my life was Louis Armstrong. When it came to Pops it was like somebody put me on fire,” he says. “Jazz became my religion. It was a way of escaping from the bitter realities of the outside world.”

Beyond the sheer pleasure of the music, Mr. Khoshbakht found a larger lesson in jazz. “If out of the worst imaginable situations and the most horrifying in the history of African Americans—slavery—such a graceful music can emerge, why can’t I be a decent and free human being in the circumstances of Iran’s troubled history of repressing freedom?”

In one of my books, “The Jazz Life,” Mr. Khoshbakht had read about Ellington telling me how, when he and the band were performing in the South in the depths of segregation, they had traveled in rented Pullman cars to get around the problem of being denied hotel accommodations, among other forms of official segregation.

“That became my way of handling difficulties living in Iran,” he explained. “If they’re not going to recognize your rights, you make your own world that nobody can touch,” he told me. “I was traveling with Duke and his orchestra in the cross-country tours of my mind.”

“After receiving my master’s degree in architecture and urban design in Masshhad in 2009, I never really took that future work seriously in the ugly realities of day-to-day life in Iran,” he says. “Instead, I went on to become a full-time jazz aficionado—listening to that music, writing about it and knowing more about it became my main task. I’d had so little to start with. Finding the line-up of a Billie Holiday record from 1944 was as difficult as a trip to the moon. But I think I made that trip.”

Before the nearly pervasive blackout of “Western values” in Iran, Mr. Khoshbakht wrote articles around 2001 for newspapers and magazines on jazz, as well as film and architecture. He also made a documentary, “Caligari to Libeskind,” on German film and architecture during the 1920s and ’30s and its influence.

“I made it only from archival materials and put it together in my own room, recording the narration in my closet,” he says. “It was shortly after Ahmadinejad took power, so my film, due to references to the Holocaust—ending with Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish museum of Berlin as one of the last embodiments of expressionist art—never found a chance of screening.”

“The whole soundtrack is jazz, from Thelonious Monk to Anthony Braxton and Charlie Mingus’s ‘Fables of Faubus’ [about Orval Faubus, the Arkansas governor, who barred blacks from his state's public schools]. This music has a great role in the film.”

Mr. Khoshbakht explained that he began his blog in May 2009 by making his own radio programs “and putting them on the Web in my blog with qualities that suited the very slow speed and highly controlled Internet connections in Iran, and having folks download them.”

Although his blog and others are blocked by the censors, he says, the people of Iran, especially the young, manage to download them using antiproxy software, he says.

Five months ago Mr. Khoshbakht left Iran for London to start a new life. “It was impossible to live in Iran any longer and try to do anything creative,” he says. “It’s been hard to survive here but the music keeps me breathing.”

In London, he’s engaged in film studies and keeps up with his blog, which continues to reach into Iran and the rest of Europe, receiving around 200 visits per day world-wide.

He’d arrived in London knowing nobody. “But amazingly, a jazz blogger from New Orleans [familiar with the blog] emailed his musician friends in London about ‘a guy from Iran who knows nobody. See what you can do!’”

Thanks to that appeal, a local bass player invited Mr. Khoshbakht to one of his gigs and introduced him to other musicians. “Also, a Spanish blogger based in London emailed me and showed me around,” he says. “That’s when I understood there still is a jazz family.”

Mr. Khoshbakht’s far-ranging view of jazz reminded me of John Coltrane telling me that in his music he was trying to connect with the global cosmic consciousness. I never dug exactly what that meant. I’ve come closer, though, getting to know Mr. Khoshbakht.

“I’m here because I have to swing. I believe I can feel the pulse of the universe when I’m listening to Ellington or Coleman Hawkins. I think swinging is nothing but attuning the jazz music with that cosmic pulse,” he says. “In a post of mine in October 2009 that I called ‘Jazz means Democracy,’ I wrote: ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re old or young; man or woman; a billionaire or a bellboy; free or inside a prison; Muslim or Christian, or Jew. As long as you can be part of this democratic conversation known as jazz, you’re in, and nothing else matters.’”

No wonder the mullahs want to silence people like him.

Mr. Hentoff writes about jazz for the Journal.