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Beach House, Southampton, NY
Beach House, Southampton, NY
Southampton, NY, United States
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Beach House, Southampton, NY
Southampton, NY, United States
Type
STATUS
Built
YEAR
1990
SIZE
1000 sqft - 3000 sqft
BUDGET
Undisclosed
I’m fascinated with American culture. Shaker Tree of Life drawings, TV shows. As a collector might gather favorite objects over time, so did I, in designing a house in Southampton, New York, cull images and ideas from our democratic visual culture. The challenge: to create a home in which the experience of living would be as rich and diverse as the culture that inspired it.
The site was spectacular: The highest point in the area, all sand and scrub pine, it looked out across Shinnecock Bay, to the Atlantic Ocean and beyond. The clients’ demand was spectacular, too: “Could you squeeze a house, garage, deck and pool onto a slot of land roughly 70-feet wide?” they asked me. “And,” they added, “we’d like to see the water from every room.”
I was used to building in New York City, where every inch counts. But a conventional floor plan — right angles, rectilinear rooms — simply wouldn’t fit on such narrow site. This nearly unbuildable lot called for some fresh angles. Some architects look at architecture in order to get inspiration for new forms; I look at art to get ideas about how to make architecture. I learned from folk art, for example, to have a more relaxed attitude about formal composition; from pattern and decoration, about the validity of embellishment; from Pop Art and Neo-Geo, about a power that can come from intentional misinterpretations and recombination of familiar things. From trying to do the wrong thing... just right.
I also learned from the American landscape, a rub of cultures, that rigorous individual interpretations of things can work. Contemporary culture aggressively combines images of all kinds. Our cities mingle skyscrapers with row houses, highways with parking lots. So why not build on that diversity? The interiors are derived from classic 1960s beach houses: White on white and full of light captured through windows of various sizes and shapes.
The plan, however, is tied more to turn-of-the-century Shingle Style houses — a distorted pinwheel, with an octagonal tower living room at its spiritual center (right) and rooms radiating from it, skewed to take in the views. Light slips and spills, softening rounded corners, offering continuity from one room to the next. Thus, the house seems larger than it is and a visitor experiences it casually, in unguarded moments.
Outside, the building evokes Shingle Style, too — but not quite. Its warm yellow shingles and blue-violet door and window frames celebrate the color-all-over exteriors of 18th century Colonial houses. At the entry side, the Cape Cod bow-roofed front porch is supported by a truss in the shape of Shaker Hannah Cohoon’s 1854 religious drawing, “Tree of Life.”
Varied roof lines seem to collide, held in check by the suburban-style garage and a rectangular pavilion—with a mildly misconstrued Palladian window. This is not Post-Modernism’s narrow view of history as nostalgia, but history as a vessel cracked open.
The site was spectacular: The highest point in the area, all sand and scrub pine, it looked out across Shinnecock Bay, to the Atlantic Ocean and beyond. The clients’ demand was spectacular, too: “Could you squeeze a house, garage, deck and pool onto a slot of land roughly 70-feet wide?” they asked me. “And,” they added, “we’d like to see the water from every room.”
I was used to building in New York City, where every inch counts. But a conventional floor plan — right angles, rectilinear rooms — simply wouldn’t fit on such narrow site. This nearly unbuildable lot called for some fresh angles. Some architects look at architecture in order to get inspiration for new forms; I look at art to get ideas about how to make architecture. I learned from folk art, for example, to have a more relaxed attitude about formal composition; from pattern and decoration, about the validity of embellishment; from Pop Art and Neo-Geo, about a power that can come from intentional misinterpretations and recombination of familiar things. From trying to do the wrong thing... just right.
I also learned from the American landscape, a rub of cultures, that rigorous individual interpretations of things can work. Contemporary culture aggressively combines images of all kinds. Our cities mingle skyscrapers with row houses, highways with parking lots. So why not build on that diversity? The interiors are derived from classic 1960s beach houses: White on white and full of light captured through windows of various sizes and shapes.
The plan, however, is tied more to turn-of-the-century Shingle Style houses — a distorted pinwheel, with an octagonal tower living room at its spiritual center (right) and rooms radiating from it, skewed to take in the views. Light slips and spills, softening rounded corners, offering continuity from one room to the next. Thus, the house seems larger than it is and a visitor experiences it casually, in unguarded moments.
Outside, the building evokes Shingle Style, too — but not quite. Its warm yellow shingles and blue-violet door and window frames celebrate the color-all-over exteriors of 18th century Colonial houses. At the entry side, the Cape Cod bow-roofed front porch is supported by a truss in the shape of Shaker Hannah Cohoon’s 1854 religious drawing, “Tree of Life.”
Varied roof lines seem to collide, held in check by the suburban-style garage and a rectangular pavilion—with a mildly misconstrued Palladian window. This is not Post-Modernism’s narrow view of history as nostalgia, but history as a vessel cracked open.
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