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All photos in this post are of Sam’s Creek, Bridgehampton
THE PROLIFIC MODERN ARCHITECT NORMAN JAFFE, who died in 1993, left the Hamptons more than 50 distinctive buildings — a collection of intriguing set pieces, not easy to find. There is no map of Jaffe-designed homes; most are discreetly sited at the end of long gravel drives with “Private Property” signs and dazzling ocean views.
“Every building is a new adventure,” Jaffe said, “which must be faced without preconceptions or loyalties sworn to a style.” Which means his work is famously inconsistent, ranging from avant garde landmarks like the 1969 Becker house in Wainscott, inspired by the ruined stone castles of Britain, to the ostentatious trophy houses of his later career.
Born in Chicago in 1932, and educated at the University of Illinois Urbana and UC Berkeley, Jaffe established a practice in Bridgehampton in 1967, when potato fields still dominated the landscape.
One of his unqualified successes is a group of five low-slung late ’70s/early ’80s houses in Bridgehampton called Sam’s Creek, nestled on one-acre lots and separated by landscaped berms. At Sam’s Creek, Jaffe seemed to be channeling Frank Lloyd Wright, transposing the horizontal stacked planes of Fallingwater to the Long Island dunes. Sam’s Creek happens to be on the map; I took a ride recently to see for myself.
Some subdivision, huh?
Basic: my new outdoor shower
OUTDOOR SHOWERS are practically synonymous with summer life in the Hamptons. That you can wash the sand off after returning from the beach and before entering the house is peripheral. The real point is that showering outdoors just feels so good, with the sun warming your body as you do it.
Unusual: semi-circular shower enclosure
When I first saw my cottage in the winter of 2009, I remember the real estate broker waving her hand at the rear of the house and saying, “…and there’s an outdoor shower!” It was in a dank, unappealing corner, with a dangling plastic shower head, and furthermore, the pipes had burst, rendering it unusable.
Sleek and minimalist
Last week, I finally got my outdoor shower. I had a plumber repair and move two outdoor spigots to more convenient spots for watering my expanding perennial beds, and I also asked him to move (re-build, actually) the outdoor shower. I like the way he crafted it out of copper pipe, with utilitarian handles for an unpretentious industrial look. I provided a new ‘rainshower’ head, left – a lot of luxury for under $50.
I had him place the shower head at the proper height for my yet-to-be-built deck. In the meantime, I’m standing on a platform rigged up from a slab of stone and two cinderblocks. There’s no enclosure yet either, so I strung a shower curtain on a rope. It all reminds me of the “I’m Gonna Wash that Main Right Outta My Hair” scene from South Pacific, or The Beverly Hillbillies. Still pretty hedonistic.
A la Robinson Crusoe: attached to a tree
HAVE YOU BEEN TO THE EXTRAORDINARY Olana? It’s well worth a field trip (and a picnic), especially as they’ve just opened two upstairs rooms restored to the late-Victorian era of Olana’s original occupant, the Hudson River School painter Frederic Church.
In the 1870s, there was a fashion for Middle Eastern exotica, and Church and his wife Isabel embraced it to the max. They visited Beirut, Jerusalem, and Damascus, returning with visions of arches, loggias, fancy brickwork, and other dazzling design elements. With their architect, Calvert Vaux, they incorporated all these into the hilltop house they were building in Columbia County, and they decorated accordingly, with imported Persian rugs and furnishings imported from that part of the world.
To today’s eyes, Olana appears more bohemian than Victorian, tasteful and arty as opposed to excessive and overwrought.
In 1964, when the widow of the Churches’ youngest son died there, Olana was still intact, decorated as it had been when Frederic and Isabel lived there. The next Church heirs, however, sought to auction the furnishings and sell the house. They were stopped by the timely formation of an Olana preservation society. With help from New York State, the house and its contents were saved, restored, and the main floor opened to the public in 1967.
This weekend, for the first time ever, the Churches’ second-floor bedroom and dressing room will be added to the tour, finally allowing us to see what’s above the fantastic staircase in the main hall. Another upstairs bedroom is a gallery containing art and photographs that had long been in storage.
The amazing wallpapers in these rooms have been painstakingly reproduced from scraps found beneath mantels and moldings.
To read more about Olana’s history and see more pictures, go here.
Olana State Historic Site
Route 9G, just south of Route 23
Greenport, NY, between Hudson & Germantown
Guided house tours: Tuesday-Sunday + holiday Mondays, 10AM-5PM
Reservations recommended: 518/828-0135
LAST YEAR IT WAS WISTERIA VINE that was the bane of my gardening existence. The stuff was so out of control it had taken down a shed and killed trees by strangulation. Hired landscapers hacked down much of it; I pulled and cut many trash bags full; and in late fall, my daughter and I applied Round-Up to the cut ends of sprouting wisteria with surgical precision. Though we didn’t eradicate it completely, the situation is much improved.
This year it’s goutweed, or aegopodium podagraria, a super-invasive groundcover that, left to its own devices, would take over the entire backyard, that’s driving me crazy. I have huge sheets of it in several areas. I tackled one of them yesterday, on hands and knees, using a claw tool to pull up as much as I could of the roots, feeling like a prisoner trying to dig his way out of jail with a teaspoon.
What makes goutweed so pernicious is that it spreads three ways. First, by underground rhizomes, or horizontally running roots a few inches under the surface. It also puts down taproots, like dandelion, and it seeds in late season, below.
It’s practically unkillable, according to contributors to the forum on Dave’s Garden, a very useful site for all things plant-related. “Aegopodium laughs at Round-Up,” one person wrote, and indeed, mine did (see the pitiful results of my spritzing, below).
Once I’ve removed all I can of the root (it can re-sprout from any tiny piece you may miss), I cover the bare soil with cardboard and old rugs, below (porous landscape fabric isn’t good enough, apparently). Soon I’ll put a thick layer of leaves or wood chips on top. And if anything dares to re-sprout, which I’m sure it will, I’ll hit it again with the more concentrated form of Round-Up. Sadly, when it comes to aegopodium, organic solutions just don’t cut it.
I’m pretty sure that both the wisteria and the goutweed were originally planted as ornamentals, perhaps thirty years ago — the goutweed possibly as the prettier, variegated bishop’s weed, which then reverted to all-green and ran amok during years of neglect.
Weed-killing is a nasty business, but it’s got to be done — if you want a garden, that is, and I do. Lucky I don’t have a day job.
NOW THERE’S YOUR PROPER JUNE BORDER, above. A little ahead of time, as is everything in this accelerated spring. Peonies; irises; columbine; foxgloves and phlox on their way. In front of a very proper old house, below, on Long Island’s North Fork, where I was on Saturday.
It’s all happening now: the farmstands, the wineries, the traffic. There are lots of greenhouses, large and small, selling vegetable starters and annuals and overflowing, ready-made hanging baskets.
I was there to visit my cousin Susan and check the progress of her garden beds, which we planted, I think, three years ago. Two years ago this month, the full-sun beds at the end of her driveway looked like this:
The evergreen shrubs and day lilies were already there. We put in dianthus, lamb’s ear, ladies mantel, catmint, and yarrow.
This past weekend, the same bed, from a different angle (pre-weeding), looked like this:
And the one on the other side of the driveway like this:
Catmint is the best. So is June.
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