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.
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