It may come as a surprise that a Dutch colonial house built in 1920 would epitomize an Italian minimalist style. But, after modest renovations, that is just how one would describe a Bridgehampton house today.

     East of the Bridgehampton School, between the Montauk Highway and fields farmed by the McCoy family, the property also has a barn and several outbuildings, including a guest house.

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    Fulvio Massi, an artist from Milan, and his wife, Naimy Hackett, who grew up in East Hampton, bought the property in 2008 from the estate of the renowned painter Esteban Vicente, who, with his wife, Harriet, had owned it for about 40 years. The house is said to have been built on the footprint of an 1850s house that burned down.

    Mr. Massi, an architect as well as a painter, and Ms. Hackett, who writes English lyrics for pop songs produced in Italy and has taught playwriting at the Bridgehampton School, moved to the States in 2000 after living in Italy for some 30 years.

    “The thing that we fell in love with,” Ms. Hackett said recently of the house, “was that it has such good bones and structure. It is a beautifully made, sturdy house.”

    As it was once for Esteban Vicente, the barn is now Mr. Massi’s studio. It has an attached storage shed, and there are a tiny potting shed and a tool shed on the grounds in addition to the guest house, which has its own small kitchen area as well as a patio.

    Of 2,000 square feet and with four bedrooms, the house itself had enough space for the couple to work with. At the rear, or south side, a small office became a sun-filled breakfast room with a view of the barn and fields. A tiny bathroom was moved near the kitchen pantry, and, coveting more interior space, the couple moved the entrance to the basement from inside to outside.

    The breakfast room, which abuts the kitchen and living room, now has French doors, and there are two sets in the living room. The breakfast room is the only part of the house where flooring was replaced, using Douglas fir to match the rest of the floors. The chairs here and in some of the bedrooms are by Arne Jacobsen.

    The kitchen, where the couple spend most of their time, restates the black-and-white, organic theme they adopted in other places they’ve lived. They installed black granite countertops and a black granite-topped work island, and replaced small, high windows with larger ones that are double-hung. Behind the counters, the backsplash is of quilted stainless steel, which, Ms. Hackett said, was inspired by some of the mobile food vendors in New York City.

    The dining room’s black Le Corbusier table was brought from Milan, and the chairs around the table are by Bellini, a Milanese designer. A two-foot-long “Queen Titania” lighting fixture over the table, which some say is reminiscent of a flying saucer, was designed by Paolo Rizzatto and Alberto Meda. At night, the intensity and the color of the light it emits can be adjusted. The fixture, from Luceplan, comes in 5 and 10-foot lengths as well.

    Sculptural sconces by Tobia Scarpa hang in several places in the house, including the second-floor hallway, which produce, Mr. Massi said, a lovely, sensual light.

    In the living room, to the right of the entryway, an orange sofa by Piero Lissoni faces the fireplace. Two Eames chairs, a Le Corbusier love seat (“LC2 Petit Loveseat”) and two black, metal-rod-backed chairs (“LC2 Petit Arm Chairs), also by Le Corbusier, came from Milan as well.

     Mr. Massi and Josh Dayton, a friend, built narrow bookcases on either side of two smallish windows in the living room, a window seat, and the fireplace moulding and mantelpiece. They replaced the trim and Mr. Massi added a crisp line to the existing door and window casings. He and Ms. Hackett built a coffee table, which sits in front of the fireplace, using wooden containers they found in the basement.

    Mr. Massi also built all the beds, including one in the guest house, where the couple lived while the renovations were under way. The beds in the rooms that the couple’s two adult daughters use when they visit were made of cedar; the master bedroom bed is of stained poplar. The master bathroom has slate tiles, two marble basins, and a drawing of naked women dancing about by the Springs artist Ralph Carpentier, who gave it to the couple as a housewarming present. Mr. Massi added a round window to the bathroom, which looks out over a Concord grape arbor, the barn, and the fields.

    Most of the paintings in the house are by Mr. Massi, who has been showing his work for about six years. An artist’s proof over the master bed is by Adolph Gottlieb, a founder of the New York Abstract Expressionist School, who lived in East Hampton and was a friend of Ms. Hackett’s parents, Walter and Vivian Hackett. A large painting on the wall next to the stairway is “Messy Diary” by Emanuele Diliberto, a Sicilian.

    And the couple have other projects in the works. One is to put up a small, glassed-in area outside the Dutch door at the front of the house, to use as a mudroom. They also plan to turn one of the bedrooms, which Ms. Hackett now uses as a study, into a walk-in closet and to transform the 500-square-foot attic into her own aerie.

    “We’re so in love with this house,” Ms. Hackett said. “It’s the perfect size. It’s not too big, but if you want to have guests, there’s room.”

    Stanley and Susan Reifer's Chinese garden, hidden in the woods north of Bridgehampton, is something to behold. With a traditional moon gate, stone bridges, inlaid paths, waterfalls, and ponds with the requisite koi along with weeping cherry trees and oriental plants, the landscape takes those lucky enough to visit to another realm.

    “I guess it's part of my search for immortality,”Mr. Reifer said, explaining that he wanted to create what is known in China as a scholar's garden. “But if you ask my wife,” he said, “she'll tell you it's just sheer lunacy.”

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    A turquoise gate at the entrance to the garden leads immediately to a pebbled path inlaid with two large Chinese characters. “It reads ‘House of Ray,’ which was as close as they could get to ‘Reifer,’ ” John Whitney of Whitney Landscaping said.

    Although Mr. Whitney was largely responsible for the trees, shrubs, and flora, the garden as a whole was designed by a well-known Chinese Impressionist, Jian-Guo Xu, who is the Reifers’ friend. On his Web site, the artist, known by his last name, Xu (pronounced shoe), writes that his aim was to create “three dimensional paintings” in the landscape.

    What might be called his brushstrokes bring together the four parts of a traditional Chinese garden – front, east, west, and back. The effect on uninitiated eyes is overwhelmingly dense — there are almost no open spaces. But in the East, the configurations of wood, stone, and water, along with splashes of green, would convey contemplation and serenity.

    “There are no flowers just for flowers’ sake,” Mr. Whitney said. “We were going more for form and texture, and foliage color and contrast.”

    Plants like bamboo, pine, and willow abound, and, in some places, they have been staged by the artist. Some large boulders are adjacent to one large and one small Norway spruce, an installation called “Mother and Child.”

    The many rooms of the garden each have a different name and meaning. The patio, seen through the moon gate, is not designed for functionality but rather to gaze at. “It would be like sitting on a potato chip,” Mr. Whitney said, referring to its rippled ground.

    Walkways lead around water features, over stone paths, and past plantings and statues that invoke Chinese history.

    A koi-filled upper pond, with a waterfall, funnels by way of a stream into a lower pond, the water recycled by an invisible and silent pump. Imposing, huge sand-colored rocks filled with holes, brought here from China's Lake Ting, have been carefully placed in the landscape.

    Groundcovers keep maintenance relatively simple, and tropical plants — like Lady palms and ginger — are removed from the ground for safekeeping over the winter.

     “You don't have to use exclusively oriental plants to create an oriental garden,” Mr. Whitney said.

    In one of the garden rooms, called the Child’s Garden, a weeping blue Atlas cedar with serpentine bark has been coaxed into an unusual shape that snakes toward the heavens. “It’s supposed to suggest longevity,” Mr. Whitney explained.

   At one end of the garden, rising dramatically, is one of the garden’s most impressive structures — a replica of one of the buildings in the Temple of Heaven complex in Beijing. “It’s a junior structure,” Mr. Reifer said with a laugh. “The real one is 60 feet wide with three roofs; this is 28 feet wide with two roofs.”

    Constructed of concrete, it has 500-year-old Ming Dynasty wooden doors, with metal handles containing animals that appear to be dogs. The interior wall of the temple contains a Tibetan-style landscape mural filled with mythical beings and gods. The room's furnishings are a Buddha, a prayer mat, and iron seats. Birds sang from the rafters when the visitor was there.

Looking back toward the house and garden from the top of the temple steps, you see several pagodas and pavilions rising above the bamboo and cedars, and the turquoise gate, which leads back to reality. The property is not large, altoigh its many levels fool the eye.

It is a garden of originality that honors the visitor with a dichotomy: soothing natural elements and dramatic ornamental structures. The overall effect is one of a grand vision that — while it may speak to a bit of lunacy — immortalizes the East on the East End.

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    Look at photographs and paintings of early 20th-century gardens on the East End and what do you see: roses, first and foremost. Climbing roses, frothy with blooms overflowing pergolas, arbors, walls, and fences. At the very pinnacle of high fashion were beds filled with the new, repeat flowering China and tea roses, surrounded by low clipped hedges of boxwood.

    Surprise of surprises, ornamental grasses crop up, used in a variety of ways.

    Most gardens in East Hampton’s summer colony had trophy double borders filled with nicely staked flowers, very much influenced by Gertrude Jekyll, and some sort of formal water feature. What the images don’t show are the legions of gardeners required to keep these spun sugar fantasies picture perfect.

    One hundred and more years later, most East End gardens have to make do with fewer gardeners. Times have changed in other ways as well. Gardens and plants are as subject to trends as clothing, but when an old style is rediscovered and popularized decades later it returns with a contemporary twist.

    Water features have evolved into swimming pools and naturalistic ponds. Instead of labor-intensive double borders, today’s more natural flower gardens tend to have a core of ornamental grasses and shrubs with sturdy perennials that no longer require staking and deadheading and that flower over long periods.

    The rose probably remains the most beloved of all flowers. Where they used to flower once and briefly, and were followed by black spot, beetles, mites, and aphids, today’s roses can flower from spring through frost with foliage as fresh in October as it was in April with little to no maintenance, except to clip fragrant blooms for the house.

    Garden fashion over the last 25 or 35 years has been motivated as much by environmental awareness and sustainability as the need for lower maintenance, however you interpret that, and the appeal of the prairie aesthetic as a refuge from urban and suburban daily life.

    That grasses were popular in the Victorian period is difficult to fathom. My memory doesn’t go back quite that far, but I do dimly recollect the last vestiges of a Victorian bedding-out scheme, backed by pampas grass and probably cannas, at the Elizabeth Park Rose Garden in my hometown of Hartford.

    Beginning in the mid-19th century in England as well as the United States, the Victorians and Edwardians used a fairly broad range of hardy ornamental grasses. A photograph of a Southampton garden shows a small formal pool surrounded by fountain grass; a similar pool at the Wiborg estate in East Hampton seems ringed by rushes or reeds. Perhaps even more surprising is a 1927 oil of a summer flower garden incorporating two large clumps of Miscanthus sinensis, what the Victorians called Eulalia grass.

    Some contemporary designers advocate landscapes that look untouched by human hands, using grasses without cultivar names. Go out to Napeague Meadow Road in Amagansett in late summer to see in its perfection what they try to emulate. In gardens, the result is often masses of floppy, bent plants, not at all what nature had in mind.

    Here is where I get on my bandwagon to put in a good word for cultivars. The word cultivar is a contraction of “cultivated variety.” They are developed by sowing seeds of, say, native switchgrass, observing the seedlings and plants as they mature, and separating out those with interesting characteristics for further observation.

    Seedlings from the same source can mature to different heights, with different flowers and flowering times, different autumn coloring, and different structure. (Think children from the same parents.) Nurserymen select ones with different ornamental traits and give them cultivar names so designers and gardeners know exactly what to expect when they use them.

    Unfortunately, this is where some people have difficulty. I’m often told, “I don’t want a plant with a name, I want the real plant.”

    In a redo some years back, switchgrass was planted at the sides of the steps half-way down the Mimi Meehan Native Plant Garden behind Clinton Academy in East Hampton Village. By late August the grasses would flop so badly we had to cut them back. They were replaced with two different cultivars: Northwind, very upright and tall, and Haense Herms, a shorter variety that turns brilliant red in autumn. This year they were cut down at the end of February only because we had to protect the new growth as the plants broke dormancy. The grasses with their floating seed heads had turned a lovely buff color but were otherwise in prime condition.

    Variety in roses, on the other hand, comes from deliberate breeding. Over the centuries man has had a love-hate relationship with the queen of flowers. Roses have almost always been popular, and there have been wave after wave of different types coming into fashion as we persisted in trying to improve the race. Until the 20th century most roses flowered for a few weeks and afterward looked anemic or used up a lot of space with their long, rangy canes. No wonder roses were segregated in areas away from houses.

    Repeat blooming hybrid teas, and their even more floriferous cousins the floribundas, were introduced by the hundreds, if not thousands, during the first half of the last century. People complained that breeders removed the fragrance from these stylish modern roses, and, unfortunately, the plants required rigorous spraying and fertilizing to maintain their looks and health.

    Beginning in about the 1970s, perhaps because of the influence of Rachel Carson and the emerging environmental movement or perhaps because the pace of modern life picked up and people spent less time at home, interest in roses began to wane, even in England.

    During the early days of my gardening life, like many new gardeners, I was totally seduced by roses: modern roses, heritage roses, David Austin roses. I tried them all, and each had its own disappointment. As the years went by it seemed always either to rain or threaten rain before I got to the maintenance, so it became haphazard. The roses went into decline, and, then, did I actually give thanks when the deer showed up and put an end to them?

    In the last decade it appears that we are coming close to attaining the holy grail of roses, at least in our area, thanks in large part to Kordes, hybridizers from northern Germany, and Peter Kukielski, the curator of roses at the New York Botanical Garden. When Mr. Kukielski began a brave experiment there, he replaced most of the bushes in the rose garden in a search for longer blooming varieties with improved disease resistance. Each year the performance of the plants is evaluated and rated. (You can look at the garden’s Web site for lists of roses and their performance.)

    I’ve toured the garden on a number of occasions. It is clear the best plants there are bred mostly by Kordes. Germany passed a law 25 years ago that banned treating roses with chemicals so Kordes had a head start breeding roses that would perform well and be beautiful without them.

    Honestly, I don’t own shares in the company, but Kordes roses are some of the toughest you’ll ever find. They are bred specifically to be grown without chemicals or growth enhancers.  Many of their newer plants have good fragrance and elegant old-fashioned looks as well. That’s what we’ve been looking for in roses for hundreds of years.

    Among them are the Kordes lines called Fairy Tale roses, Vigorosa roses, and Climbing Max roses. Last year I ordered Kordes roses for the East Hampton Garden Club plant sale from Palatine Roses in Ontario, which introduces many of its new roses in North America. They arrived as dormant, bare-root bushes on April 1, were distributed Memorial Day weekend as vigorous, good-size plants, and by summer were busy putting out armloads of gorgeous blossoms.

    As these roses from Kordes and (I hope) other breeders gain more exposure and become better known, I suspect roses will once again come back into the vanguard of fashion and popularity.

   When one thinks of garden and landscape photography, it is often of color-saturated vistas and floral abundance. But when Leslie Rose Close gave a talk on Sunday afternoon about the history of garden photography, it was some time before the first color slide appeared, and the effect was jarring.

    The richly tonal black-and-white images dating back to some of the first photographs by inventors and innovators of the field, such as William Henry Fox Talbot and early followers of Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre, were magnificent on their own, but the stories they told were just as remarkable.

    Ms. Close, who trained as a painter and sculptor, earned a master’s degree at New York University, where her thesis was on Mattie Edwards Hewitt, a landscape and architectural photographer active from about 1909 until her death in 1956. She opened the talk, held at the Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack, with Hewitt’s image of Anna Gilman Hill at Grey Gardens, a place Hewitt photographed extensively before Phelan and Edith Bouvier Beale bought it in 1924.

    The photograph of a woman gardener by a female photographer in a garden designed by a female landscape architect, Ruth Dean (who was married to Aymar Embury, the architect of Guild Hall), showed the prominent role women were allowed to play in the field of garden design and photography in the early 20th century.

    The discipline is so rich with characters and stories that it is no wonder that it has become an increasingly popular field of study within photographic history. Hewitt­ left her husband, Arthur Hewitt, who was also a photographer, to start a firm in New York with Frances Benjamin Johnston, whose photographs Hewitt had printed when she served as her husband’s darkroom assistant. They, too, had a falling-out eight years later and dissolved the partnership. By this point, however, Hewitt had enough clients and contacts to successfully strike out on her own.

    Fox Talbot himself was an accomplished Renaissance man: a painter, botanist, and chemist, among many other things. He was one of the innovators of pre-digital photography, as we know it today, with negatives and paper prints. His book “The Pencil of Nature,” published in installments between 1844 and 1846, was the first commercially published book of photographs.

    Ms. Close pointed out that the earliest images from cameras were of trees and plants, as a slide of one of Fox Talbot’s oak trees was shown. Paintings were still the preferred mode of reproducing a landscape. Photographs were seen as “scientific and not appealing, a tough sell.” But Fox Talbot recognized the potential for photography immediately, according to Ms. Close, who said he thought it was “a wonderful tool for travelers, artists, botanists, and historians. He got it exactly right.”

    An image of the Crystal Palace from the Great Exhibition held in Hyde Park, London, in 1851, revealed the work of one of Daguerre’s followers, Baron Jean-Baptiste Louis Gros. The show featured industrial marvels, and the glass building enclosed a full-size elm tree. The image itself is a marvel, capturing the whole of the three-story tree and the exhibition space, along with statues, fountains, and other landscape features, all housed within the glass-and-steel edifice.

    Other historical characters of note included Mary and Frances Allen, known as the Allen Sisters, from Deefield, Mass., who had their own colonial revival theme park around 1900, predating Old Sturbridge Village. The sisters would dress in period costume and do chores the way they were done in the 18th century. They would also take photographs of each other dressed in costume that they sold as souvenirs.

    Ellen Wilmott, who died in 1934, was another intriguing figure. At an estate in Essex, England, from 1892 until her death, she employed 100 gardeners, sponsored some of the plant-hunting expeditions in the Far East and Middle East, and ended up with many varieties of plants named after her.

    “She would fire a gardener at the sight of a weed in a flower bed . . . booby-trapped her gardens to prevent thieves, and was even known to carry a pistol.” Although Wilmott disdained photography, Ms. Close said that she was herself an accomplished garden photographer. It was a divide that would continue through the early 20th century.

    Ms. Close said the subject is so broad and full that she could not cover its entire history. Still, she managed to tackle each decade of development in the field — regionally, nationally, and internationally. She showed images of and by figures such as Carleton Watkins, whose photos of the West helped preserve Yosemite National Park, as well as anonymously taken pictures of significant landscapes and people, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was also a celebrated gardener.

    Among the images of local gardens she shared were the Creeks in East Hampton before it was purchased by Alfonso Ossorio, and the great modernist landscape that Arthur Edwin Bye designed for George Soros in Southampton. Its mounds of earth echo the nearby beach dunes.

    Ms. Close started a program in American landscape history at Wave Hill in the Bronx and co-founded the Catalog of Landscape Records in the United States, a database at the New York Botanical Garden. She has her own large food garden in Bridgehampton.

   It’s a wonderful time of year on the East End. A quintessential day can include a winter beach walk and an afternoon before a blazing fire.            For the most part, the love of nature and a real crackling fire has trumped local interest in gas fireplaces. But, slowly, house by house, a conversion is happening. Unlike Colorado, we do not have a code banning wood-burning fireplaces. Yet.

    Over time, a wood-burning fireplace, once a hierarchical architectural element in a house, essential for survival and primary for cooking and heat, was surpassed by central heating and 60-inch, flat-screen televisions. Building a fire involved physical work and preparation. Today, gas fireplaces offer efficient alternatives. They have become design elements for any style of architecture.

    Here are a few different ways gas fires have been implemented.

    If you have a wood-burning fireplace and a masonry chimney, you can install a gas line and gas logs without a problem. This allows you to have an authentic or historical mantel and fireplace with an on-and-off switch for the fire. Sounds easy, right?

    If you are building a new fireplace, you can choose to build such a chimney and firebox even though you intend to use gas. This would allow you to retrofit the fireplace for wood-burning at a later date.

If cost is an issue, you can build a wood-framed box (no concrete or masonry) into which a metal fireplace housing fits. These units come with or without a chimney, or duct. Such units are typically vented through the roof in a 6 or 8-inch cylindrical duct, but there are non-venting units, which tend to be more modern in style and many are rated for New York City apartments as well.

If you are buying a firebox gas unit you can add various elements. If you want the gas logs to have a traditional wood aesthetic, there are several ceramic or concrete molds that create the appearance of high definition bark. For a more contemporary look there is the option of using fire beads or glass or stones. They come in a variety of colors and styles and give off a reflective glow.

    Many of these units actually give off significant heat. This can be direct heating within the room or a supplemental heating source for the entire house. Transferring the heat generated around the firebox requires a fan system, which pushes the air to the desired rooms through ducts. Today, technology makes it possible to have a fireplace in any room in any house.

    The best part of a gas fireplace? One answer may be a lower carbon footprint. The other answer? No more ash cleanup or risk of fire from burning embers!

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    Mike Tagliavia is an apprentice architect in East Hampton, working 60 hours a week when he can and loving every minute of it.

   A diorama of Montauk’s original fishing village is the first thing visitors see when they walk through the door of the East Hampton Town Marine Museum on Bluff Road, Amagansett. There’s a reason. Nothing represents the history of fishing in Montauk better than the community on Fort Pond Bay of hardy fishing families, which was all but wiped out by the 1938 Hurricane.

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   Ralph Carpentier of Springs is the artist who set out in 1965 to create the museum on behalf of the East Hampton Historical Society. The fishing village was “an important place,”  he said recently. Important and colorful.

    The residents of the old habitat are mostly gone now, but they had a lot to say about it in their time. They told about Prohibition days — or, more properly,  nights — when fishermen met bootlegging boats offshore and brought crates of booze ashore to be stored in the village until trucks came to distribute it to the west.

    There were the stories about “frost cod,” actually whiting left beached on falling tides, which was collected in buckets during the winter months.

    In summer, the Shinnecock ferry visited the bay on its rounds to and from New London, Greenport, Sag Harbor, and Montauk. She is anchored in the bay in Mr. Carpentier’s diorama. 

    The late Gus Pitts, one of the fishermen who emigrated from Nova Scotia to Montauk in the early 1900s, was  videoed in the 1980s talking about his life in the old village. His father had come to the South Fork to work on the bunker (menhaden) boats, large steamers out of Promised Land on Napeague, and stayed, to settle in Montauk. (The video can be borrowed from the Montauk Library.)

    In 1914, as a young man, Captain Pitts was among the first residents of the village. He and his family rode out the 1938 Hurriane up the hill in the Montauk Manor. He recalled returning to the village to find “26 houses and 14 boats on top of each other, demolished.”

    “Some were put back on their foundations,” Captain Pitts said. Other people were afraid the devastation would be repeated and moved away from the bay. But the village lived on in a reduced state until the Navy chose Fort Pond Bay as a site for a torpedo testing range during World War II. 

    These days, it’s hard to imagine life in Montauk’s original downtown. There were no cars, no lights, no lumber, no nails. Houses were heated with kerosene, if the family could afford it, or with wood from fish boxes and driftwood. “The train engineers were our friends. We supplied them with fish and they would dump coal beside the tracks that we collected in buckets,” Captain Pitts said.

    The one-room school had a stove. “The teacher would tell us to go get seaweed or run to the tracks for coal.” There were 25 kids in grades one through eight. Ice was harvested from nearby Tuthill Pond for Parsons Fish Market and to keep fish cold while waiting at the freight house on the west end of the village. Captain Pitts said sea bass was kept alive in floating wooden containers until the end of the season when the price rose.

    Boats were often blown aground in northeast storms. “They would be repaired and launched again.” He said it was not uncommon for crews to swim out to their boats.

    And then there was Doc Edwards, who visited the village from East Hampton either on horseback (changing horses at the Napeague Life-Saving Station) or by a “railroad push car” powered by two men. Captain Pitts said David Edwards delivered 85 percent of the babies in Montauk.

    Such was life on the unprotected bay until the developer Carl Fisher dynamited dunes on the north end of Lake Montauk to create the Montauk Harbor Inlet.

   In Mr. Carpentier’s diorama, visitors can see the railroad dock, a siding that extended into the bay. Fish bound for New York City were loaded directly from boat to railroad car. The dock is near where the soldiers returning from the Cuban campaign in the Spanish-American War, including Col. Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Rider volunteers, came ashore from ships in 1896, headed to Montauk’s Camp Wikoff to recuperate.

    Captain Pitts described how a few of the houses had been built using fish boxes and Army surplus boxes that had served as stalls on the railroad flatcars that brought the troops’ horses to Montauk.

    The first packing houses on Fort Pond Bay were owned by E.B. Tuthill and Jake Wells. Perry B. Duryea Sr. bought out the Wells business in 1916 and the Perry B. Duryea and Son lobster business buildings are about the only remnants of the original village after the 1938 Hurricane.

    The fishing village is “where it all began in the late 1800s,” Mr. Carpentier said. “I found in my research it’s where trawl fishing was first used. There were beam trawls before, but the otter trawls started in Fort Pond Bay in the 1890s,” he said, referring to the evolution of fishing using a net dragged from a boat.

    “When I designed the museum I was committed to presenting the history of fishing in East Hampton — whaling and fishing. I wanted a frontispiece.” And so the diorama was launched.

    The designer insisted on authenticity. “I came across a map done in 1912 that had names of cottages and houses, and the names of people who built them. I decided to organize the names and called around to see if people had photographs. It was incredible. Everyone seemed to have had cameras back then.”

    “They had photos. We had meetings once a week in Montauk. They would discuss what color a house was. ‘It was red.’ ‘No, it was green.’ I explained, we’ll ask three or four people and if more say it was green, that’s what it will have to be. That’s how we did it, from photos, even what the roofline was like.”

    “The East Hampton Historical Society wanted a [marine] museum. The town got the building from the General Services Administration. It had been a Navy barracks. ”

    “I was haulseining on the beach with Ted Lester at the time. I knew all the bubbies, and I knew a few of the draggermen. It all fell into place.”

    The work it took to construct the train stations, tracks, docks, packing houses, the little houses and their satellite privies, was done by a number of people. Mr. Carpentier said he received $10,000 from the historical society to complete the diorama.

    To help visitors from away get their bearings, the rear wall of the diorama is a map of the East End of the South Fork from Sag Harbor to Montauk. Standing in for the waters of Fort Pond Bay in the diorama is a piece of clear, wavy plexiglass under which Mr. Carpentier placed a piece of plywood painted blue. “I got lucky on that. I got it from a catalog. I think it was shower curtain. It worked well.”

     The diorama has been moved into the entryway on the right side, the first exhibit museumgoers see as they come in through the front door. Mr. Carpentier said he approved of the move and of the other improvements made to the museum in recent months.

    “It used to be a place where the old fishermen hung out. Whenever I needed, they were there for me. It used to be that young mothers hung out there. The kids would play on the lawn,” Mr. Carpentier said. He said it was something he’d like to see happen again.

    The Charles H. Adams house, a newly restored Queen Anne-style gem on Lee Avenue in East Hampton, is impressive at any distance, but up close the fine craftsmanship is jaw-dropping.

    “It’s what makes the house unique,” Marsha Soffer said. Ms. Soffer oversaw the two-year restoration on behalf of the Fine Greenwald Foundation, a private charitable organization that inherited the house from her  uncle, Martin Fine, in 2008. She is a member of its board.

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    The public will have a chance to visit the house during a cocktail party tomorrow and a house tour on Saturday to benefit the East Hampton Historical Society.

    Many large houses wow at first because of their size, and that’s true of the Adams house, too. Designed by the Carnegie Hall architect William B. Tuthill, it has 10-plus bedrooms and close to as many working fireplaces, an expansive wraparound front porch, a tower at each end, three stories, a porte cochere, and a big modernized kitchen.

    Yet even with all that, a visitor might first notice something more usually commonplace — the glass in the front windows. The double-hung windows in the tower rooms — both the glass and sashes — are actually curved, just as they were when the house was completed in 1891. In one second-story bedroom, triple-hung windows open to become doors onto a private deck. In the entry hall, the windows are leaded glass with round glass bull’s-eyes, the designs having been copied from original blueprints. Ms. Soffer tracked them down in the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection.

    “I was insistent on restoring the glass,” Ms. Soffer said. “I had the windows shipped to Boston, where they took apart each one. They said not one window was the same size. . . . I did a huge amount of research. On that scale, it was difficult to find someone who could do it and handle it in the appropriate manner.”

    Such attention to detail is evident throughout the house, from the rich millwork of the wood-paneled entry hall to the gliding pocket doors between the hall and the living room on one side of the hall and a wood-paneled family room on the other. It is clear that no shortcuts were taken.

    Ms. Soffer “has done a tremendous job,” Robert Hefner, an East Hampton historic preservation consultant, said.    

    Ms. Soffer’s uncle, one of the first real estate developers in the NoHo section of Manhattan, made few changes to the house in the nearly 30 years he owned it. By the time of his death, it was in need of some serious care. He left no specific instructions about what the foundation was to do with the house, asking only that any proceeds from its sale or rental should support the foundation’s philanthropic efforts.

    The house could have been sold straightaway, Ms. Soffer said, “but the market collapsed in 2008. We could have Saran-wrapped it and just left it, but the decision was made to renovate it and bring it back to its former glory.”

    Charles H. Adams (not to be confused with the late cartoonist Charles Addams of Sagaponack) was a knitwear manufacturer who served as a United States representative and in the New York State Assembly and Senate. He died in 1902, and by 1916 the house was sold out of the Adams family.

    During a tour early this month, Richard Barons, director of the East Hampton Historical Society, said the Queen Anne style, a precursor to the more stripped-down Shingle Style architecture prevalent on the South Fork, developed in England, but got its name in America. It was becoming popular just as “people began to build these great summer cottages.”

    The style broke with the traditional architecture of the 1880s, which tended to be symmetrical, Mr. Barons, who taught architectural history, said. “It rambled and was asymmetrical. It had an interesting informality; it could look grand, but it wasn’t off-putting, it wasn’t a stone castle.” The style developed around the same time as central heating, he said. “Suddenly, you had the freedom to have all these open spaces.”

    Queen Anne houses “had a sense of whimsy — parts of them could look like lighthouses — which made them extremely popular with seaside communities,” Mr. Barons said. “It was a modernist house when it was built; it was a brand-new style.”

    “The project evolved from a simple renovation to really understanding what the house was,” Ms. Soffer said. The house had undergone a major renovation in the 1930s and 1940s, and a large rear addition was built. “They had created, over the years, a kind of rabbit warren of rooms, kind of Alice in Wonderland-like,” she said. There is still something of maze-like quality to the house. One walks in at one level, climbs a flight of stairs, and somehow seems to arrive at a lower level.

    Part of what Ms. Soffer and the foundation grappled with was whether to respect the earlier renovations or to take the house back to its 1891 character. “I originally went to the National Parks Service to get historic designation — it wasn’t completed — but I wanted to follow their guidelines,” she said. In the end, the decision was some of both.

    In the recent work, some of the smaller rooms were opened up and combined with others. Some became closet space for larger bedrooms; others were added to bathrooms. Now, for instance, the master bedroom not only has walk-in closets but spacious his-and-hers bathrooms. Hers is in gleaming white marble with a sleek free-standing tub.

    In almost every room, details of the original house or from its 1930s renovation have been recreated or restored. The fireplace in the master bedroom has a carved wooden mantelpiece decorated with griffons. In the dining room — with everyday seating for 12 — the hand-plastered 1930s molding was restored.

    Important spaces like the entry hall and wood-paneled family room were kept true to 1891 designs, but other rooms were modernized with a deft touch — the kitchen, for example. Its heft and size seem to fit the house’s 19th-century demands, but its openness and conveniences are 21st century.

    The porch, which was falling down in 2008, has been “taken back to what the 1891 drawing had for it,” Ms. Soffer said. “We totally copied off the original blueprints.” The goal was to keep as many of the main beams as possible “because the timber is beautiful.” In general, she said, the old-growth pine timber was more dense than anything that could be found now. 

    A room referred to in the 1890 plans as a smoking room is well worth the climb up three flights of stairs. At the top of one of the towers, it has a domed ceiling that seems to disappear, and amazing acoustics. Before all the trees that have grown up in the past 120 years, it would have been a fabulous place from which to watch the ocean in the distance.

    Back then, “The only way up was by a thin, rickety staircase,” Ms. Soffer said. “There were six to eight bedrooms, basically two girls in each room, eight or nine chambermaids, and the men of the house were going up after dinner to smoke.”

    As grand as the house is, it has a warm feeling. It was made and then remade for family living. “The house, it feels like it loves you back,” she said.

Hans Vandebovenkamp, who has fulfilled more than 100 commissions for his massive sculptures and had more than 50 one-man shows in different parts of the world, has executed perhaps his largest — living — sculpture to date in Sagaponack, where he and his late wife, Siv Cedering, set about transforming a former horse farm into a sculpture park, replete with chickens and golden pheasants.

    They bought the property, Ranch Court, about 12 years ago from Hank Wintjen, who had not only built a house there in 1975 but 13 outbuildings. Together, Mr. Vandebovenkamp (who recently changed the spelling of his surname) and Ms. Cedering, an artist and prolific writer, redid almost everything and, in the process, achieved their dream. The house was completely gutted and rebuilt and the small buildings were made functional for their work. A pond was put in and the grounds filled with sculpture.

    Although the place was a mess when they bought it, Mr. Vandebovenkamp gave the former owner credit for “the vibes of this place; I just rearranged it.”

    The house now gives testimony to the artistic life. It is full of vibrant color — on the walls, on furniture, and on rugs, both Native American and contemporary. High-end designer furniture shares room space with Asian pieces and Buddhas along with antiques from Ms. Cedering’s native Sweden, such as an armoire. The house is also an eclectic gallery, full of paintings, drawings, and sculptures, many by friends and local residents, including Priscilla Bowden, Denise Regan, Joan Semmel, Connie Fox, Bill King, Willem de Kooning, Syd Solomon, Larry Rivers, and Lou Zacks, among others. There is also at least one work by Picasso.

    Among Ms. Cedering’s paintings in the house is a landscape triptych that disguises three cupboard doors in the dining room. Ms. Cedering added sculpture to her artistic oeuvre after the couple’s marriage, and Mr. Vandebovenkamp made large casts of the small works for the grounds.

    The house now measures 3,500 square feet and has four bedrooms and five bathrooms. What Mr. Vandebovenkamp called “pokey” small rooms were opened up and French doors put in to replace tiny windows. A deck was added off the master bedroom, with a Jacuzzi on one end and a large canopied Balinese bed at the other.

    The flat ceiling of the master bedroom was raised into  a peaked roof. The room is 12 by 25 square feet, with a walk-in closet and two adjacent bathrooms. The bedroom and two other rooms overlook the pond, which has a diameter of 120 feet. Mr. Vandebovenkamp leases land on the other side of the pond and renovated stables to Amaryllis, an equine rescue organization. “I like seeing horses walking around . . . and deer, and turkeys,” he said.

    A small porch at one end of the house became a sunroom with a pyramid-shape window under the peak of its roof and a crystal chandelier near the window. It was Ms. Cedering favorite room in the house.

    After his wife’s death, Mr. Vandebovenkamp built a 40-foot pergola (or pergolata as she called it in a poem). It extends out from the entryway of the house and holds a grapevine. On the other side of the house, forming a sort of hedge between the path leading to the house and the parking area, are seven Asmat shields from New Guinea.    

    Having grown up in Holland, Mr. Vandebovenkamp said the property reminded him immediately of farms in his native country. He recalled that he had a struggle with the Southampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals, which wanted the outbuildings torn down. That their new neighbors liked what the couple planned helped persuade the Z.B.A., he said, to let them keep the buildings provided some were moved in from the property line and they were all renovated.

    Mr. Vandebovenkamp, who studied architecture in Holland before his family immigrated to Canada, earned a B.S. in design at the University of Michigan in the early 1960s. Not long afterward, he migrated eastward and found himself in Springs, near his compatriot Willem de Kooning. After marriage, children, and a divorce, Mr. Vandebovenkamp left the South Fork for New Paltz, N.Y., where he lived for 20 years.

    He and Ms. Cedering met when he returned to the East End. Before long, she sold the house she lived in on Further Lane in Amagansett, and he sold his farm near the Shawangunk Mountains. “I had a lucky period in my life that lasted 11 years,” Mr. Vandebovenkamp said of the time he spent with his wife. “She was so talented. She was extra ordinary. . . . She was a great love.” He characterized their marriage as a merger. Ms. Cedering died in 2007.

    Mr. Vandebovenkamp has collected many of her published works, which include poems, screenplays, and fiction, as well as TV programs for children and magazine articles, which he plans to donate to the University of Umea in northern Sweden, near where Ms. Cedering grew up.

    Walking along the paths through the grounds now, one is struck by its fine trees. When they started the task of creating a sculpture park, the couple removed 70 dead trees and planted 225 new ones, in addition to bringing a few from Ms. Cedering’s Amagansett property.

    As for the outbuildings, Ms. Cedering’s studio was a cottage on the farm when they bought it. A former garage for horse trailers is now a gallery that sits next to the swimming pool and close to one of the two chicken houses. Another small building is used for storage, and a former horse barn is used as a drawing studio.

    The only new building is a 2,700-square-foot sculpture studio Mr. Vandebovenkamp built about six years ago. A metal building sheathed in shingles, it is heated by solar panels on the roof and has radiant heat underfoot. Three glass garage doors on one side and one on the other roll up and down to get his large works in and out. The building has 20-foot ceilings and, at one end, a loft behind picture windows. The studio also has a 400-year-old Chinese wedding bed on a platform at one end. Mr. Vandebovenkamp sleeps in it occasionally.

    The studio is a great place for dinner parties, Mr. Vandebovenkamp said, explaining that he lends the space to musical and other groups. In addition, Mr. Vandebovenkamp has two sons and five grandchildren and Ms. Cedering had three children and five grandchildren. They are frequent visitors.

    The compound and the couple’s artwork are described in a book, “Saga­ponack Sculpture Farm,” published this year by Mr. Vandebovenkamp’s gallery, Bernarducci Meisel Gallery, and Louis K. Meisel. It was designed by Geralyne Lewandowski, Mr. Vandebovenkamp’s assistant for the last eight years. Also acknowledged is Mr. Vandebovenkamp’s sculpture assistant, Kevin Miller, who has worked with him for almost 20 years.

    Mr. Vandebovenkamp’s work, which has been described by collectors as a gateway to the spiritual, referred to himself recently as “a non-registered Buddhist.” In his opinion, however, neither the Dutch nor the Swedes are particularly spiritual. “They are more practical,” he said. Many of his friends have been involved in holistic and spiritual endeavors, which rubbed off, he said, and he may also have been influenced by his father’s becoming a Baptist minister in Canada after a career as a schoolteacher. All that notwithstanding, Mr. Vandebovenkamp’s art and his working and living spaces reflect his conviction that everything is interconnected. “Nature is my inspiration,” he said.

    It may have been a hay barn at one time, but Tracy and David Gavant and their daughters call it the “happy house.” The Amagansett building, just off Main Street, dates to the early 19th century, but with expansion and some updating, it feels quirky, but modern.

    Ms. Gavant said she and her husband fell in love with the house in 1999 at first sight. “We had been coming out here since we started dating, first in house shares, then graduating to couple shares. The house was available for rent or sale, and we looked at it for a rental but then realized we had to have it.”

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    Ms. Gavant had been the publisher of Elle Decor and is now chief marketing officer for Interiors magazine. Given her background, “the last thing we were interested in was anything cookie-cutter or catalogue,” she said. The house, with its different rooflines and haphazard additions over the years, fit the bill.

    Mr. Gavant was attracted to the house’s history. It was he who dated parts of it to the early 1800s. The surrounding land was once the Conklin farm and dairy.  The original part of the Gavants’ house, the hay barn, is now the main hallway. The dairy barn has been moved to another part of Amagansett.

    Legend has it that peonies around the property were offshoots of plants brought back by a Conklin ancestor, a sea captain who sailed to the Far East in the 19th century.

    The Conklin family, who lived in a larger house on Main Street, which dates to the 17th century, used the small building out back as their summer house. This may have been because they were running out of room or, what is more likely, because they rented their house to city folks in the summer, a common local practice. In any case, the small house grew organically. “Whenever they needed more room they converted more to living space. Then, they would add more rooms to the house,” Mr. Gavant said.

    When the Gavants first bought it, the house was cozy, perfect for a couple, if not necessarily for guests, who had to traipse through the living quarters to get to the guest bathroom off the kitchen.

    Even so, the Gavants found the low doorways and eccentric layout charming — that is, until they had children. By then, the Thermidor industrial oven that came with the house, which had one side exposed, was becoming an uncomfortable hazard. It was hot to the touch and heated the house too much for comfort on a summer’s night.

    Thinking about a kitchen redo, the couple consulted the architect Erica Broberg and her husband, Scott Smith of Smith River Kitchens. Ms. Broberg offered further suggestions that intrigued them. “The first thought was to replace the stove, which led to renovate the kitchen, which led to create two kids rooms, which led to renovate an old bathroom. It’s the ‘while we’re at it’ renovation,” Ms. Broberg said.

    “We decided to keep with the ‘cottage scale’ and add a series of rooms,” Ms. Broberg said. The new rooms include a master suite, office, and kitchen addition on the first floor and bedrooms for the couple’s daughters, now 6 and 11, on the upper floor, with a reading nook and playroom. The former master bedroom is now the guest room.

    Ms. Gavant said the reading nook was her favorite part of the house. Set into the upstairs landing over the kitchen with a built-in daybed and shelving, it was inspired by one at the Sunset Beach hotel and restaurant on Shelter Island.    

     The additions were to tie into the complex series of roofs on the original structure. But once Robert Biondo, the project’s contractor, who specializes in old houses, opened up the walls and beams, he found it “significantly under-supported and dangerous,” according to Ms. Broberg.

    “We found old shutters used as subflooring and chicken wire within the walls. Those working on the site started calling the house ‘the chicken coop,’ ” Ms. Broberg said.

    For Mr. Gavant, the work took on the character of an archaeological dig. “Everything seemed to have seven different layers.” Whether it was the exterior shingles, which were simply added on top of earlier ones over the years, or the different levels of carpet, wood, and linoleum on the kitchen floor, the house certainly had a history. The renovation revealed the barn’s original red-painted shingles as well as doors and wood co-opted from boats.

    In the master bedroom, Mr. Biondo’s crew bent wood to form a gothic arch to mimic an existing one in the main hall. New floorboards had to be installed in parts of the house, but they were given a dark stain, consistent with the wide boards of an earlier time.

    The kitchen has up-to-date appliances now and a drinks area, a second sink below an outside view, a corner fireplace, a butcher block island with a kids refrigerator built into it, and a wine refrigerator. The house now also has three porches, a front porch for after-dinner relaxing, a porch off the kitchen for outdoor meals, and a covered porch with a swing where the children play.

    A second fireplace straddles the kitchen and living area. When she’s in the kitchen, Ms. Gavant said she likes to watch her two girls on the couch in the great room “hopefully reading, but probably watching TV, with my husband on the computer. With the fire going we get to share in the warmth of it all.”

    The couple had discussed the renovation with a number of contractors, who told them to tear down the house and start from scratch, Mr. Gavant said. “Renovating the original structure would be more complicated and more expensive, but we said we didn’t want new construction. That’s not why we’re here.”

    Mr. and Ms. Gavant praised the architect and contractor for managing to erase the transitions between this century and previous ones. “Their main goal was that people would walk in and not be able to figure out where the new construction began and the old house ended,” Mr. Gavant said, noting that most guesses are wrong. With merging rooflines and old-meets-new angles, Mr. Gavant noted “there’s not a straight line in the house.”

    The furniture is subdued and the color palette neutral and bright. The Gavants personalized the space with flea market and tag sale finds, including bottles, books, and a huge collection of rubber ducks.

    There is a calm that overtakes the family when they enter the door, Ms. Gavant said. “We will sit and do a puzzle at the dining room table as a family,” she said. The couple love to travel and are prone to cabin fever, “but I never feel that way here. There’s so much light and the peaceful surroundings are so much more conducive to relaxation. I want to stay home.”

    Most educated people today realize that we have been frying the planet with unsustainable practices in building, in transportation, in almost everything we do. Many would build an efficient house if they realized how easy it would be, if it didn’t add that much to the cost, and if it would not have to be ugly.

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    Having taken courses through the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, I knew it was possible to go much further than most people realize in the realm of energy efficiency. Indeed, a house can produce its own energy. With global warming and climate change in full assault, it is possible to demand a house that does that. It is not that hard to do. In simplest terms: Design a house in such a way that a reasonably sized solar system will provide all that it needs.

    Confronted with the task of designing and building a house for my wife, Tori, and myself, I set myself the goal of doing that.

    Ninety feet long, but only 22 feet deep, with the long south-facing axis mostly glass, there is no need for electric lighting in daytime in any of the main rooms, and even on the coldest days of winter the house will be above 80 degrees with no auxiliary heat if we allow it to go there.

    Bathrooms, hallways, and storage are on the north. Because north-facing windows are a solar liability, they are just large enough to provide cross ventilation and are high on the walls where heat gathers. They are electrically controlled so it is easy to take advantage of good weather and avoid using powered climate control.

    All the glass on the south side of the house would make it unlivable in summer if it weren’t shaded. Electrically controlled awnings shield the glass in summer to prevent heat gain. We found it just as easy to push a button and drop the awnings as it would be to turn on the air-conditioning, and that eliminates a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere.

    Step one in a sustainable house is tight building, no air leaks, and very efficient insulation. Foam insulation inside the stud spaces seals every crack in the envelope. Two inches of Styrofoam as a base for the stucco on the outside of the sheathing interrupts the conduction of heat through the studs in the wall. And earthen berms with insulation outside the foundation are employed to varying degrees on all sides of the house. This stabilizes the temperature inside the envelope to a point where a very small heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning system can keep the temperature within acceptable range.

    People worry that a house that is too tight is unhealthy, and that is a reasonable fear. But now we have heat-recovery ventilators. These appliances provide constant ventilation with minimal loss of heat by way of a heat exchanger that transfers the BTUs from outgoing stale air into a separate stream of incoming fresh air.

    The heating and air-conditioning are provided by Mitsubishi air-to-air heat pumps, which are powered by electricity generated on the roof. These are ductless systems, four of them in the house, and they are extremely efficient and also inexpensive. The money saved here paid for the elaborate insulation.

    When people ask how much sustainable building adds to the cost of a new house — as visitors did last weekend when our house was one of three in the Town of East Hampton on a national solar and green buildings open house tour sponsored by Renewable Energy Long Island — I answer that it depends on how it is done.

    The solar system cost $62,000, but after Long Island Power Authority rebates and federal and state tax credits, the figure is down to $13,000. Because of a 99 out of a possible 100 HERS [Home Energy Rating System] rating, I also got another check from LIPA for $13,000. So that pays for the whole solar system. The fossil fuel savings is all pure profit — for us, as homeowners, as well as for the planet.

    The appliances are all Energy Star rated, and the lights are predominantly LED. For example, the 10 can lights in the great room draw 3 watts each, so turning them all on at once is equivalent to using one 30-watt incandescent bulb.

    Even the grass outdoors is energy efficient: a mixture of dwarf grasses and microclover, it does not need to be fertilized, as the clover generates nitrogen. It does not grow tall, so we cut it only a few times per year. It is drought tolerant, so needs little water!

    At the risk of sounding a bit wacko, I confess that I bought an old-fashioned push mower after reading that gas mowers are 11 times more polluting than cars. I’m old enough to have grown up using those as a kid, and it is still good exercise.

    With a swimming pool and air-conditioning in the summer, the house was still stockpiling about 25 to 30 kilowatts per day in credit from LIPA. One can take a check from LIPA for that. We chose to buy a made-in-America Chevy Volt, a car that runs on electricity made on our roof. Now we are talking payback!

    The strategies we employed in the house are not peculiar to the modern style we preferred. Most, if not all, are just as applicable to the Shingle Style. I think of the Shingle Style houses in our area as having the beauty of a well-kept dowager. I’ve worked on many of them, and I love them (the houses, not the dowagers). I think of our house as a teenager. The beauty comes from its innocence and its hope for the future of the planet.

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    Don Matheson, whose house, completed about a year ago, is in Springs, has been a builder for 25 years.