Summer House Hamptons

For a large, newly-built house near Westhampton Beach, our challenge was to forge dimension, texture and style through a sequence of architectural interventions. By adding more windows we created a symmetry to the elevations which had been missing; replacing sliding doors with French doors augmented the atmosphere with dignity.

Our goal was not to encrust a contemporary house with period ornament, but to lend it the time-honored language of understated architectural detail, a way of accentuating and humanizing space.

The floors of the house were originally surfaced in a variety of materials, including tile, which made the rooms feel “chopped up.” To create an unbroken sense of flow–and warmth– from room to room, we installed dark wood floors throughout, using sea grass and sisal area rugs to further unify the rooms.

The double-height living room had a rather blank fireplace with a sheetrock surround. Using Connecticut fieldstone, we built a floor to ceiling surround using the “drystack” building method, in which no mortar is visible; the rough effect added shadows and texture to the space. A massive 19th-century wooden chandelier brings human scale to the 18-foot ceiling.

With the house itself thus reimagined, furnishing became a delightful enterprise of layering English and American 19th century antiques with pieces from South America, the Far East and India, including colonial styles. Warmth, materiality and restrained rusticity became the keynotes of this house, which now appears rooted and timeless, inside and out.