Hamptons Weekend Cottage Keeps it Simple

A FRIEND OF MINE has had a tendency to move often, both her family’s primary residence and weekend/vacation homes. Fortunately, she also has a talent for making any apartment or home look Domino-ready in very short order.

This two-bedroom 1930s cottage in a community of older homes near the village of Southampton, Long Island, is a long-range proposition, but it still looks essentially the same as it did one late summer evening two years ago. That’s when I saw it for the first time and took these photos, shortly after my friend and her husband moved in. (I’m finally getting around to sharing them as part of an effort to resume more frequent blog-posting),

The cottage proves a few things: that (well, as recently as two years ago, anyway) you can still find a substantially built house on a nice chunk of property — in this case, a flat, sunny acre — with vintage details, wood floors and walls — for under half a mil. And that you don’t need to over-furnish or overspend to create an interior that’s chic and functional. Sometimes simple is best.

My friends did a tad of work in the bathroom, installing a new wall-hung stainless steel sink, and virtually none in the rest of the house, even leaving the kitchen just as it was, with its basic appliances and linoleum floor.

They wired up some home-made lighting, and recycled furnishings they’d had in storage. The main seating is two twin mattresses on platforms, arranged in an L in a former sun porch. The dining table converts to a desk, or perhaps it’s a desk that converts to a dining table.

It’s all charmingly improvised and very much to my taste. There’s a renovation in the cards that will add a bathroom, a large bedroom, a screened-in porch and outdoor living areas. Meanwhile, the unassuming cottage fits the bill.

 

HAMPTONS VOYEUR: Casual Decor for a Quirky Rental

PART OF THE FUN OF BLOGGING is getting the occasional bead on a great subject from a reader. I met Dorothee van Mol and her husband Paul a year ago when they came to look at my East Hampton cottage as a possible year-round rental. We spent a pleasant hour chatting on my deck, but ultimately, they decided to rent in Southampton, closer to their primary home in Brooklyn. Dorothee continued to follow my blog, and when she saw the unconventional modernist house I bought in East Hampton last spring, she knew I’d be interested in seeing the sprawling complex she and Paul have been renting.

The site: now that’s a tale. As is the house itself, which began as a 1920s industrial dairy building. It’s unclear whether cows were actually housed there, but refrigerated compartments, concrete floors, a pass-through marked “Milk and Package Receiver,” and other quirky elements are clues to its origins. The acre-and-a-half spread, on the fringe of Southampton village, was owned at one time by a garden designer, some of whose landscape architecture remains, and then by three partners who began an ambitious expansion of the house with cinderblock construction and casement windows, covering many thousands of square feet, before feuding and parting ways. The property came up for rent, and that’s when Dorothee and Paul, who have two college-age kids, stepped in. They decorated resourcefully, on a shoestring, with furnishings they had in storage, items they found on the property, and a few fill-ins from IKEA. I love its casual Bohemian air.

Let’s circumnavigate the property first, and then we’ll go inside…

Walls around the gravel parking court and elsewhere on the property are made of stacked stone in wire cages called gabions.

Charcoal gray-painted trim against brown vertical clapboard siding, looks chic and ties together disparate windows and doors.

One of two kitchens — yes, that’s right — is in an extension at the front of the house.

Around the side, you sense the building’s utilitarian origins.

Old perennial beds and self-seeding annuals soften the unfinished walls of the never-completed extension.

There’s a lap pool around the back, of which I’m terribly envious, surrounded by ornamental grasses and an allee of trees.

Long gravel walks punctuated by cypress trees and lined with flagstone packed in wire cages have a classical Mediterranean feel.

A wall of glass windows and doors opens to a gravel courtyard. The parking court and entry gate are in the stone wall at left.

The long west-facing entry hall gets afternoon light. Kitchen #1, below, is down the end.

There’s a small dining area in that same kitchen, above…

and a rustic bar.

The main living space has one spectacular window and a wood ceiling.

Wire grids found around the property were pressed into service as bulletin boards.

There’s a sophisticated contemporary bathroom with a marble vanity and the world’s smallest sink, below.

Kitchen #2, below, looks out into the heart of the abandoned construction project, which, as greenery overtakes it, seems a bit like an ancient archaeological site.

Below, the enormous master bedroom.

Two additional bedrooms, one with the curious cubby-hole.

The future of the site and the couple’s tenancy is uncertain, so — though they put in a fair amount of work painting and decorating — the whole project has a casual, spur-of-the-moment feeling about it. Thanks, Dorothee, for letting us have a look.

Bona Fide Colonial in East Hampton

ONE OF THE PERKS of writing for shelter magazines is getting inside a lot of interesting houses. For the holiday issue of Hamptons Cottages & Gardens magazine, I got a look at the interior of one of East Hampton’s venerable Main Street houses, built around the time of the Revolution.

Its longtime owners removed a later Victorian front porch (for which they were find $5,000 by the Town and considered it a fair deal), restored its wavy glass windows and wood-paneled walls, and furnished it largely with period-appropriate antiques.

You can find the whole article right here.

Photos: Tria Giovan

HAMPTONS VOYEUR: Post-Mod in Amagansett

IF YOU’RE NOT IN THE HAMPTONS and can’t pick up a copy of the latest Hamptons Cottages & Gardens magazine in front of Citarella, go here to read my latest article about a fabulously fashionable couple’s marvelous mid-century modern home in the Amagansett woods.

The house itself, by architects Julian and Barbara Neski, was built in the early ’80s, but classic ’50s furnishings work spectacularly well in it.

Moroccan rugs warm things up on one of the indoor-outdoor terraces.

The river-pebble floor in the bathroom, above, is among the very few changes the current owners made to the original structure.

Photos by Anastasios Mentis

Montauk Magic

ONE OF THE OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS of writing for shelter magazines is that you see a lot of potentially envy-inducing places. Usually, I’m fine. A place may be beautiful, decorated by a top designer, or owned by very rich people, but it’s not generally something I can personally see myself living in, or desiring to live in, and I return to my humble cottage without wanting to cry.

Not so with my latest assignment for Hamptons Cottages & Gardens magazine. For an upcoming issue, I’m writing about a newly built house — compound, actually — on Lake Montauk that looks from the outside like a vernacular cedar-shingled cottage, but inside — sensitively, seamlessly — has all the bright, clean openness of  modern architecture.

The architect is Robert Young of the NYC firm Murdock Young, and the photos in this post (I’m just giving you a sneak peek) are by Michael Moran.

Though the house is 4,300 square feet, with five bedrooms and quite a few baths, it’s emphatically not a McMansion. It’s so cleverly broken up into smaller elements (the architect calls them ‘Monopoly houses,’ which are linked together by a tissue of steel and glass) that it feels totally human-scaled.

Look for the issue, distributed locally in stores here on the East End of Long Island, on August 15.