The site is in Sag Harbor, near the Hamptons and long considered a younger cooler town, with a strong history of architectural experimentation. The clients had a house next door, and were looking to augment the property with what was originally thought of as an extra house, but which became, throughout the design process, its own standalone home.
The lot was one of the smaller ones in Sag Harbor, but once the owners wanted to make this a completely functioning house, the architects got to work figuring out how to put a four-bedroom two-bath house into an incredibly compressed envelope. Local zoning restrictions required that the entire building fit within a 45-degree section of the site, and the height of the building further limited how close to the street it could be. These limitations, though, encouraged an investigation into the articulation of the stairways and the challenging floor plates that culminated in architectural innovation.
The owners wanted the house to be incredibly open and accessible from the back, but retain an essential privacy—without appearing foreboding—from the front. That requirement led to almost fully opaque front, detailed with a single door with a single window about it, and then a wide open almost Miesian back, where a full wall of glass—that can be tempered with gentle floor to ceiling curtains—exposes the interior of the house to the outside, and the rolling landscape to the interior. That simplicity of form, windows divided by clearly defined mullions, is expressed throughout the rest of the house, where architecturally brilliant yet seemingly simple moves like a stair that turns twice so as to provide an ideal view from the second story arrival landing to reinforce the structure’s fundamental design. The simplicity of the form was crucial to the architects, who held firm that there be no other windows on the front, thus creating a truly dynamic house that can hold multiple identities within its footprint.
On the interior, an emphasis on various shades of green appears throughout, with particular emphasis on the green tile around the fireplace - a moment of visual and tactile texture that shows the team’s hand in softening what could otherwise feel like a starkly modernist space. A sunken light well on the basement level re-articulates that green while drawing light down to the fourth bedroom. The interior layout was informed by an emphasis on both platonic and rational form, in which the entrance is perfectly centered while the internal circulation—the stairs upstairs and downstairs—are completely separated and pulled apart. By sustaining a focus on orienting and reorienting one’s views without sacrificing privacy, the architects have created a home in which the daily lived experience is intimately intertwined with the shifting landscape.
Meadowlark
Garnett.DePasquale
Silver

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Location
Designer
Client
Private
Floor area
358 ㎡
Completion
2023
Windows
Glazed Bricks
Finishes
Finishes
Appliances
Plumbing Fixtures
Accessories
Furniture
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