Long Island’s bucolic North Fork is, geographically speaking, just a short distance away from the mansions and gardens of the Hamptons and Sag Harbor—but spiritually it’s another universe. Working farms and fishing villages still thrive here, and windswept dunes roll lazily into the water. This house—a shingled Dutch Colonial Revival with a gambrel roof and tidy procession of dormers—sits on a particularly spectacular lot at the narrowest point on the peninsula. It’s a spit of land, an isthmus, barely 1,500 feet across, and it separates Long Island Sound from Gardiners Bay. It’s an island on an island, isolated and dramatic.
Though this North Fork house had beautiful lines and an incomparable setting, its interior was fractured and disjointed thanks to years of patchwork renovations. And so, working closely with our clients and the architect Tom Kundig—the second time we came together in this particular three-sided configuration—we gutted the building while leaving its timeless exterior intact. (Tom also designed a typically discreet annex to make space for guests and added a six-by-six Jean Prouvé demountable house to be used as an office.) We didn’t want to call attention to our interventions. We also weren’t interested in slavish obedience to a particular period or style.
By the time we started this project in 2013, we’d been working with these clients—a warm, generous, gregarious family—for almost a decade, so benefited from a professional relationship built on the many years of friendship that preceded it. We’ve even vacationed together, allowing Rudy and I to experience firsthand the way they live in and use their spaces, both their Tribeca apartment and the Hawaii compound. We’d spent years collecting together, too, assembling masterworks by luminaries of twentieth-century design like Joaquim Tenreiro and José Zanine Caldas. They’ve been interested in Brazil’s midcentury efflorescence from the beginning—Finn Juhl and Edward Wormley, Jean Prouvé and Mathieu Matégot, sometimes accumulating pieces early enough in the project that they would go on to inform the architecture itself. Working with clients over the course of many years opens endless possibilities to identify what they need and want and to begin collecting objects and ideas long before a new project begins.
Thanks to our long history together, we had time, for instance, to find the perfect dining table—in this case a long, graceful piece designed in the 1950s by the great Charlotte Perriand, one of tragically few female voices admitted into the canon of twentieth-century designers. Here, too, there are multiple important works by Jean Royère, including a pair of canopied lounge chairs, and very rare Joseph-André Motte chairs with patchwork “harlequin” leather seats. David Wiseman designed incredible bronze screens and fireplace tools for the soaring concrete hearths at either end of the two-story great room. There really isn’t a corner or moment in this house that isn’t imbued with provenance and intention. They are also all thoroughly used—vitally and vividly lived. Finding the right client, or, maybe more accurately, being found by them, is nothing short of alchemy.
