Recent Stories: Habitat

Is it possible that some people who regularly visit the South Fork are unaware that the Parrish Art Museum has relocated to Water Mill on the site of an old nursery? Not likely.

Still, in the mostly effusive reception the Herzog and de Meuron building has received in the regional, national, and international press since it opened in November, the 15-acre property on which the building sits, designed by Reed Hilderbrand Landscape Architecture in Massachusetts, has been largely overlooked.

   The history that runs so deep on the South Fork is matched by a passion for it and, too often, by a willingness to destroy it. For notorious example, Wick’s Tavern in Bridgehampton, once catering to drinkers and gossips at the same Main Street intersection as two historic houses that made it to the 21st century, the Nathaniel Rogers House and the Bull’s Head Inn. Wick’s Tavern dated from the end of the 17th century yet was leveled in 1941 so a gas station could rise in its place. (It’s gone now, too, and won’t be missed.)

   Even if you can’t put a name to the Montauk Association houses, also known as the Seven Sisters, you have probably seen and admired them from afar while driving away from the Montauk Light. Look southwest from the highway and you see a collection of just-right-size Shingle Style cottages, each set on a little rise in the moorlands, surrounded by acres and acres of wild woods and tangled underbrush ending at the bluffs.

   Like a whirlwind tour across the globe, a walk through Mady Schuman’s spacious house, tucked away in the woods of Amagansett, offers a glimpse of the common threads that run through disparate artistic objects.

   It didn’t take long for architects and architecture buffs to hear that something extraordinary had gone up on Spaeth Lane in East Hampton, and before they knew it Ellin and Renny Saltzman were coping every weekend with small armies of wide-eyed trespassers.

   Yellow chard, of all things, is the “it” plant in Parisian gardens this year.  During a sunny and warm week in early September, the light was at the perfect angle to show off the luminosity of its stems.
    Yellow chard was the star of gardens from a small, well-used and loved neighborhood park in the Marais to potagers in an interior courtyard in the 16th century Hotel de Carnavalet, and in an extravaganza of urban agriculture at the renowned Bagatelle Gardens in the Bois de Boulogne.

   It sits on a 100-foot-wide sliver of oceanfront dunes in Montauk-on-Sea, a small subdivision laid out years ago on Napeague. Called Shore House, it is the dream beach house of Glenn Pushelberg and George Yabu, partners in a doubly eponymous firm known internationally for restaurant and retail design, which is based in New York and Toronto.

    When Mary Jane and Charles Brock, who had spent 25 years as the owners of a comfortable East Hampton Village house at the corner of Buell Lane, went looking for something where they and their two adult children could spread out and do their own thing, they didn’t envision another Main Street residence.

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   Feng shui is the practice of adjusting one’s immediate environment to harmonize the inner self with outward activities. Everything in our immediate surroundings has a physical and psychological effect on us — for good or bad — and the goal of feng shui is to achieve maximum health and well-being by enhancing those surroundings.

   Centuries ago there was tulipomania. More recently and on a larger stage, there was the dot-com bubble, followed by the housing bubble. We know what happened to them.
    Gardeners now seem caught up in a hydrangea frenzy. There are mopheads, lacecaps, and Annabelle types, not to mention oakleaf and Japanese panicle hydrangeas. For the truly smitten, there are Japanese mountain hydrangeas (serrata), villosas, and other more tender species and varieties.

    Fairies, imps, little folk, leprechauns — all the ministrants seen and unseen we will now discuss are not just at the bottom of a fine garden but at its middle and top; indeed, they are all through the plot. They are the makings of a good garden as much as expertise in general and fine compost in particular. They are enormously, energetically busy, as busy as the atom and, of course, equally invisible. It is not necessary to see something to believe in it. Think of odors. Think of music. Think of greed.

   When Pietro Nivola and Katherine Stahl decided to move and reconstruct the house he inherited on Old Stone Highway in Springs, they may not have anticipated how complicated the project would be or that it would take five years.

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