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.”

    Having survived a move from one place to another, a history of scandal and rumor, and seizure by the federal government, the Stafford Hedges house in East Hampton has remained intact for more than 230 years.

    William Ronan, who was chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and a close friend of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, moved the house from its original site on Pantigo Road (where a branch of the Hildreth department store is now) to Cross Highway, tucked between Middle and Hither Lanes, in 1954.

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    The story goes that during the journey, heavy rain bogged the process down. Although the house got where it was going without damage, it had become so sheathed in mud that local wags dubbed it “Ronan’s Folly” or “Folly Hall.” Later, regardless of whether or not it was true, the talk was that Governor Rockefeller visited the house for trysts.

    Alex McNaughton, who bought the house in 1979, sold it six years later to a young man named David Bloom, who before long was renowned for an impressively lucrative stock Ponzi scheme involving millions of dollars from investors including the Rockefeller family, the Sultan of Brunei, and Bill Cosby. He was allowed to settle the charges against him by turning over his assets, which included real estate and paintings worth $8 million.

    Brooke Kroeger and Alex Goren bought the house in 1988. The couple, self-described transplants, had come to the South Fork for the first time the previous year, renting a house in Bridgehampton for a month. They fell in love with the area, and, at the end of the summer, proceeded to buy land on Bridgehampton’s Ocean Road.

    “It was basically a potato field,” Ms. Kroeger said. “But suddenly we realized we were too old to wait for trees. It was either spindly new trees or spending a fortune on landscaping. So we sold it. Almost immediately. We started looking again with our children . . . and we were just enchanted by this tiny little house.”

    “Hippopotamus Camp,” as the family calls it, was, and still is, an 18th-century half house, designed with two first-floor windows and a door to one side of the facade. It has been said that half houses look as if they are waiting for another half to be built, which was usually the case. The door would then be in the center with two windows on either side of it, and the look would be Georgian.

    “But truthfully, it was already too small for us,” Ms. Kroeger said. “We contacted [the East Hampton contractor] Ben Krupinski about expanding it, but he said we should wait and live in it for a while and then give him a call. We lived in it for 18 years.”

    The Hedges house has six bedrooms and five baths spread over three floors totaling 2,700 square feet.

    “It wasn’t that attractive a property,” Ms. Kroeger said. “It certainly wasn’t for people looking for something commodious and comfortable. But the house was in perfect shape. We basically did nothing, just painted. We thought we were incredibly brave not to have air conditioning.”

    Today, the Hedges house celebrates the past and the masterful craftsmanship of an earlier time. The plaster walls and the configuration of the rooms are intact. The first floor has original 30-foot-long exposed beams which run from the front parlor all the way through the dining room. Echoing the beams are the original wide-planked pine floors. They have a subtle orange glow, the result, perhaps, of having been walked on for so many years.

    The walls and ceilings are bright white. The furnishings are, for the most part, antiques the couple gathered over the years, including diminutive Victorian chairs and a loveseat. Armchairs are covered in cream and powder-blue.

    “All our pieces are rather eclectic,” Ms. Kroeger said. “It’s really just about what we like.”

    An upstairs bathroom is done in sea-green tile, befitting a house near the sea. A hollow table filled with beach glass decorates a small sitting room. The shards are blue, green, or white, with a few reds, which are the most coveted. The family adds to the collection every year.

    With three children, their spouses, and seven grandchildren who would “stop in” and stay for a few weeks, Ms. Kroeger and Mr. Goren eventually decided they had to have more space.

    “The whole point of the house was for the family to gather, but there wasn’t one room where we could all fit,” Ms. Kroeger said with a laugh. “The biggest room was 15 by 15.”

    The couple worked with the East Hampton architect Douglas Moyer and Mr. Krupinski for a year before starting to build. They masterminded an expansion that triples the square footage of the original house and added a separate garage. Ms. Kroeger said the family and the architect took pains to make sure the expansion, though modern, would complement the historical aesthetic of the old house. Cedar shingles were used on the exterior and windows have 12-over-12 panes.

    The expansion, which has a fully furnished basement, is at the rear of the house. Its large family room, behind the old house’s dining room, overlooks the pool. It has leather couches and enormous curtainless windows.

    “I love paring down and editing out,” Ms. Kroeger said. “I don’t like a lot of stuff. And I don’t like the odor and dust that comes with curtains. They really collect moisture in beachy places.”

    The family room leads to a gleaming new kitchen with an outdoor dining area where mechanized glass walls can be raised or lowered in keeping with the seasons. A louvered-glass breezeway, where Ms. Kroeger puts her lemon trees during the frigid and unforgiving months. connects to the two-story garage, where she has a studio. A master bedroom has its own porch and outdoor fireplace.

    The family were more than delighted that the work, begun just after Labor Day in 2006, was completed in 10 months, in time for the summer. They moved in before it was quite finished, knowing they now had room to gather and sprawl.

LongHouse Award

    The annual LongHouse Reserve Landscape Award will be presented on Sept. 17 to a firm of Washington, D.C., landscape architects whose low-maintenance blend of indigenous and cultivated elements is well represented in East Hampton. Oehme, van Sweden & Associates, the designers of several important gardens here, will be honored at a lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.

    After lunch, Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies and a previous recipient of the landscape award, will moderate a discussion between Todd Forrest of the New York Botanical Garden and Kris Jarantoski of the Chicago Botanic Garden. Both gardens are clients of Oehme, van Sweden.

    Tickets begin at $100 for LongHouse members, $150 otherwise. A $250 ticket includes a signed copy of “The Artful Garden” by James van Sweden and Tom Christopher. For $500, patrons will also be treated to dinner the night before, on Friday, Sept. 16, at Carole and Alex Rosenberg’s house in Water Mill.

Horticultural Alliance

    The Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons will sponsor two events this weekend. On Saturday, Daniel J. Hinkley, a world-traveling plant collector, will speak on “From the World to Your Garden” and “The World Condensed: The Gardens of Windcliff.” His talks will be followed by a panel discussion with the horticulturalists David Seeler, Elizabeth Lear, Pam Healy, and Dennis Schrader, all familiar names on the East End.

    The 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. event, to be held at LTV Studios in Wainscott, honors the legacy of Paul Karish, a founding member of the alliance.

    Admission, which includes morning refreshments and a box lunch, is $125, or $100 for members. Payment in advance is required, either through the alliance office or by check; a form can be downloaded at hahgarden.com. Attendees should specify a vegetarian or non-vegetarian lunch.

    On Sunday at 2 p.m., the alliance will sponsor an illustrated lecture,  “Designing with Shrubs.” Lorraine Ballato will discuss the use of easy-maintenance shrubs, both new and traditional varieties, with an emphasis on color and deer resistance. She is a freelance garden writer and a lecturer and teacher at the New York Botanical Garden.

    Her talk will take place at the Bridgehampton Community House and costs $10. It is free for members.

    The Horticultural Alliance will not hold its end-of-summer garden sale this year.

    Look up the word ecletic in the dictionary, and it may just have a picture of Wilsonville, a shop off Amagansett’s main drag, as the definition.

    The space, down a gravel path behind 216 Main Street and directly across from the Amagansett Library, is not the typical chockablock antiques store, although there are antiques, and many of them; nor is it a gallery, although it features art in every medium from the last century or so.

    “It’s a visual utopia,” said the store’s owner, Mark Wilson. “Everything is equal.” No one item is more or less important than any other.

    And ecletic rules the day: a large painting of an unknown Yale baseball player from the 1930s, an educational shade describing all parts of a leaf, a huge embroidered celebration of Lucky Lindy’s inaugural flight, modern photography, antler chandeliers, tribal masks, nautical flags, antique toys, and a new addition which had only just arrived.

    “I’m not sure who he is,” said Mr. Wilson, holding the figure of a small unpainted wooden man, grown shiny from the oil of a thousand fingers over a hundred years. The proud fellow is dressed in his finest buttoned “weskit,” with a luxurious mustache on his face and broken chains around his wrists.

    “Maybe he’s Houdini, or some other escapologist,” Mr. Wilson said. “It looks like something a carnival worker would wear at the turn of the last century.”

    Wilsonville, which seems an apt name for the store that is a little utopian society of its own, opened over July Fourth weekend. “It was not my intention to open this store,” Mr. Wilson said. He and his longtime partner, Claudia Bicalho, own and operate Lazy Point, also in Amagansett. “These pieces have just come to me over the years. It’s some sort of mysterious attraction.”

    During the interview, visitors strolled in and out, all of them smiling at some piece or another, remarking one word over and over again: “Cool.”

    The available pieces change quite frequently. On one visit two gorgeous milk-painted pie safes graced a wall, on the next they were gone, snatched up by Jimmy Fallon “to use for all his gaming consoles,” said Mr. Wilson with a grin.

    Mr. Wilson’s artwork is also on show, but played down, or rather, laid down. They are canvas paintings of Persian carpets and are used as such, although some are also exhibited vertically on the walls.

    “I started them 10 years ago, as a reaction to 9/11,” he said. Mr. Wilson’s loft in Lower Manhattan literally “looked over the pit.”

    “I wanted to paint the only thing in Arab culture that we seem to accept as beautiful,” he said. “The carpets represent sacred space. Freud had them, one

    When Robert Stansel and Tammy Marek of Portland, Ore., saw a rendering of what an architect hoped to build on property on Green Hollow Road in East Hampton, they were intrigued. Three years later, Maziar Behrooz’s Arc House is almost finished. The couple have been living in it since last winter, although they travel back and forth to the West Coast.

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    An arch, which needs no weight-bearing columns, has been used in buildings for thousands of years — from ancient Rome to today’s airports. But, Mr. Behrooz said, it had not been used in contemporary residences except for emergency shelters in areas hit by natural disasters.

    The East Hampton architect had been interested in how industrial construction could be adapted for housing and decided to give the arch a try. When he showed the previous owner of the Green Hollow property a picture of an airplane hangar, with no front or back but the nose of an F-16 sticking out of it, its potential was apparent.

    To be able to build such a house, however, he needed a client for whom industrial design and materials were not taboo. Mr. Stansel and Ms. Marek wanted something contemporary, but were ready to pare down. The result is a house that is made primarily of concrete and glass with a corrugated metal roof. “It was so different from what you’d normally see in a contemporary house,” Ms. Marek said in a recent interview.

    “I can’t think of any builder locally or nationally who had done what we wanted to do,” Mr. Behrooz said. “On paper we said this should really work, and then when it really did work, it was fascinating to see. On the one hand it spoiled me tremendously . . . I’m really grateful that, after seeing other work I had done, they trusted me enough to complete the project. It’s given me tremendous confidence in continuing. I think it’s the way to go in the future,” he said.

    Together, Mr. Behrooz and his clients developed and refined the concept. “We probably spent a good year working on the plans with Maziar, back and forth,” Ms. Marek said. “We flipped a few things, added a guest suite, bathroom, and powder room . . . we added a big walk-in closet . . . the kitchen design was different.”

    With three acres of undulating land and 3,200 square feet on each of what was planned as two levels, there was a lot to work on.

    The more public spaces — the living room, kitchen, and dining room — are under the arch, which is made of stainless steel and has 14 “ribs.” Mr. Behrooz described the structure as “like a slice of a Quonset hut.”

    The private spaces are in a flat-roofed wing behind the arch, containing a master suite with a fireplace, a guest suite, two bathrooms, and closets. Visible outside the master suite is a 1,200-pound plinth-like stone from an Alaskan glacier that Mr. Stansel discovered in Portland. They also are planning a Zen garden outside the master bathroom.

    The couple planted a vegetable garden between the arch and the bedroom wing and a terraced garden between the house and the garage, which juts out to one side of it at a lower level and has a succulent garden on its roof. They also had the Bayberry Nursery plant Chinese temple trees, a cut-leaf red Japanese maple, thread- branched cypresses, moss juniper groundcover, and, as screening, native white pine.

    The driveway uses Belgian block stones set far enough apart to allow grass to grow between them, and to help it appear as part of the landscape rather than a roadway. The finishing touches and a swimming pool should be completed by next summer.

    The livable spaces on the lower level have two more bedrooms, another bathroom, a media room, an open gallery hung with large paintings, Ms. Marek’s study, a storage area, a linen closet with washer-dryer, as well as a gym, steam room, and sauna. The owners also plan a wine cellar off the gallery.

    Ms. Marek designed the bathrooms and closets and chose some of the interior materials, such as the flooring, doors, and stairs, which are of Oregon black walnut. The kitchen was designed by a Portland firm, with cabinets from Toronto.

    A floating staircase cantilevered off a cement slab on one side with cables on the other leads to the lower level. The ground was pulled away at different points there, Mr. Behrooz said, to allow for light and air.

    “It is a traditional technique using underground spaces — the cool air goes up in the center of the arc, and, because of the shape, a natural convection path is creContinued from C1

ated and the air is pushed sideways and down again.” A geothermal system regulates the temperature and humidity.

    “We use very little propane,” Ms. Marek said, “and we have very small bills for such a big space, about $600 a month.” Filters in the utilities room are changed every four months and there are thermostats in the living room, kitchen, and master suite. The couple chose LED lighting because of its efficiency, and Ms. Marek decided on radiant heat for the bathrooms and steam room.

    There is a catch basin that doubles as a reflecting pool at the base of each end of the arch and cisterns to capture rainwater that is then filtered and brought into the house. Some of it goes on the grass and gardens while keeping the Suffolk County Water Authority bill low.

    “It’s very comfortable,” Ms. Marek said. “There were a few other things we wanted to get to, but we ran out of time last year.” Ms. Marek said she likes the loft-like feeling provided by the arch. “You’d think from the outside it would be more industrial but it’s not, really.”

    “Doing things the old-fashioned way is not recognizing all sorts of opportunities, technologies, and materials that are nowadays available,” Mr. Behrooz said. “I don’t know if the Shingle Style is still the preferred aesthetic. I’m not getting calls about that anymore. It’s the 21st century. We can’t build the way we did in the 19th and 18th centuries, and, to be green, people know that you have to explore different things.”   

    The geometric planes of a sleek new house on a bluff overlooking Gardiner’s Bay at Lion’s Head make it at once solemn and serene.

Joseph and Herbert Shalant, who are brothers, were catalysts for the modernist design, after a house on the property that had been in the family for 32 years was destroyed by fire.

    The fire occurred in 2001, at about the time of the national tragedy. “It was terrible. The house burned down completely, and to this day, we have no idea how it happened,” Joseph Shalant said. The original house was, Mr. Shalant said, “very modern for its day, with a spectacular openness which really did inspire us.”

    Mr. Shalant collaborated with Bates Masi + Architects of Sag Harbor. Their goals were to collapse the barrier between the house and the surrounding sea, to minimize maintenance, and to protect privacy on the three-quarter-acre lot.

     Mr. Shalant and his wife, Wendy, come to East Hampton as often as they can, but spend most of the year in Pacific Palisades, Calif. Herbert Shalant and his wife, Phyllis, who live in Hartsdale, N.Y., are here more frequently, as are their daughters, Jenny and Emily Shalant, an editor and fashion designer respectively, and Emily’s 2-year-old son, Charlie.

    The 3,500-square-foot house was completed in the winter of 2010. Paul Masi explained that building a new house provided the extended Shalant family with a unique opportunity to rethink the use of manmade spaces as well as to take into consideration the sometimes harsh weather of the waterfront location.

    Where the previous house had required time-consuming maintenance, Mr. Masi chose materials that not only are durable but weather naturally, such as wood with water-resistant tannins and oils and repurposed slate roofing for siding material. The stark coupling of stone and wood, Mr. Shalant said, melds the structure with the natural environment.

     The family enjoys two master bedrooms, one on the first floor and one on the second. “The theory is that when we come in the wintertime we don’t have to heat the entire house,” Mr. Shalant said.    

    The most salient element of the design, however, is what Mr. Masi calls “frames.” Walls and windows create varying vignettes that frame “snapshots” of the sky, sea, and bluff, and one space leads into another.The deep frames that flank the second-floor balconies provide privacy, while the east and west facades are open to views of the water.

    “They create spaces that defy the conventional distinctions between indoors and outdoors. At the roof deck, portions of the ceiling and upper walls are omitted to create an ‘outdoor room’ open to the sky and the landscape, yet more contiguous with the interior than a conventional deck or terrace. The frames direct attention away from the house to the water views and surrounding landscape,” Mr. Masi said.

    Herbert and Phyllis Shalant took charge of the interior, selecting furnishings with muted hues and clean lines to complement and interact with the architecture. While Ms. Shalant enjoys the sense of space and privacy the house allows, one of her favorite features is a Sonos sound system that provides music throughout the house and on the porch, where family and friends gather to watch the passing boats or dance beneath the stars.

    Phyllis Shalant said she had always enjoyed living in traditional houses but that the new, totally modern home had become a place she savors.          

   “There is so much light, it’s phenomenal. It makes me happy all the time. You open your eyes and it’s bright. It’s also very roomy, with a big kitchen. I love to cook and so do my daughters.”

    Ms. Shalant said the house had influenced the children’s books she writes, which always feature a small animal like a skunk or raccoon, as well as Jenny’s career at the Wildlife Conservation Society, where she edits its Web site.

    Much to Joseph Shalant’s chagrin, however, it took five years to get the construction under way because of zoning restrictions that were adopted in the years after the previous house was put up. Mr. Shalant praised the contractor, Karl Avallone, but said he had found the local bureaucracy maddening.

    Mr. Masi explained: “The house is a couple hundred feet from the edge of the bluff; we moved it back about 50 feet from where it was before.” He added that, environmentally, the new house was a huge improvement.

    “There are a whole host of agencies that you have to coordinate including the D.E.C. [State Department of Environmental Conservation], local and state regulations, the Health Department, et cetera, and their information does not necessarily coincide with one another. It was a long process,” Mr. Masi said. He noted that the Lion’s Head property owners association also has building regulations.

    “But we really wanted to work within the parameters of the regulations because they are in place for good reasons, it makes for a better community. We try to turn those boundaries into design challenges,” Mr. Masi said.

     Solving the challenges worked out to the family’s satisfaction.

    “We love the location of the house particularly,” Phyllis Shalant said. “With the woods that belong to the Girl Scout camp on one side, you can always expect to have deer visit on a daily basis. There are also big flocks of wild turkeys and frogs and turtles to rescue from the pool. We’re also down at the bay early in the morning to walk the dog, Ozzie. The bay is always exciting because it always looks different.”

    Joseph Shalant, who is a swimmer, kayaker, and windsurfer, echoed these sentiments. His nautical playthings can be put right on the bulkhead for immediate access to the water. Furthermore, the house has exceptional vistas that, as far as he is concerned, far exceed any oceanside view.     

    “I really don’t know why the oceanside is preferable,” Mr. Shalant said. “You can see Gardiner’s Island, and you don’t have to worry about the waves washing your kids away! And all the fishermen are setting their net traps right off the property; sometimes we even have lobster bakes with them. And the night sky is fabulous, particularly along the bay. The stars shine so brightly above the clanging of the buoys down there and the water sloshing against the shore.”

    A quiet house on the Montauk bluffs is at once a testament to the architecture of East Hampton and the wildness of the moors.

    Built in 1980 by the renowned photographer Richard Avedon, who died in 2004, the house recently underwent painstaking renovation but remains devoid of the porches, patios, and porticos that typify so many second homes.

    Fred Stelle, of the eponymous Bridgehampton architecture firm, who teaches a design and construction workshop at Syracuse University, his alma mater, has worked on scores of outstanding contemporary houses. But his affection for what is still called the Avedon House is unmistakable.

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    “The house is important because it’s where you spend the night and eat and so forth. But that’s not the real reason the house is there. You like the spot. We wanted to preserve this idea that the house was not a big statement,” Mr. Stelle said.

    He began the renovation in the fall of 2009, working with Jim Kim of Men at Work, which is based in Wainscott. His wife, Bettina, collaborated when it was time to do the interiors. “Bettina’s approach to life in general is similar to the idea of this house,” Mr. Stelle said. “Not everything has to be perfect. Not everything has to be the newest and best and latest. There are values in things that have been created by other people, by people before us.”

    The rather modest, 3,500-square-foot house is on 7.5 acres. It has four bedrooms and four baths in addition to a diminutive guest house, an orchard, gardens, a stable, and a rustic pool. Every structure is secondary to the surrounding sea.

    The story goes that the photographer Peter Beard owned a house nearby and, enticed his friend Mr. Avedon to come out and look at the property when it came up for sale. By all accounts, Mr. Avedon looked, and loved it. At the time, Mr. Avedon’s place in the panthenon of portrait photographers was secure. He was known for revealing the personal attributes of famous people, with work frequently in magazines such as Vogue, but he also photographed the working class, drifters, and carnival workers. Mr. Avedon modeled his house on Home, Sweet Home, the museum on James Lane in East Hampton Village, Mr. Stelle said. “It’s interesting that a guy that is a paradigm of modern photography would choose to do something simple and nonconversational, almost traditional. But I think he loved the aesthetic of East Hampton mixed with the wildness of Montauk,” Mr. Stelle said.

    Calling the house “austere,” Mr. Stelle said it had been built without modern appliances, air-conditioning, or even the best materials.

     After 30 years of salt-laden wear and tear, the house simply wasn’t in good shape, and the one-bedroom guest house and tool shed were in great disrepair.

    “The intent was to not change the look at all,” Mr. Kim said. “The codes and practices today, 30 years later, are much more stringent. We had to update, revamp, and reinforce.”

    Almost every facet of the house’s infrastructure was brought up to modern standards, including the entire cedar-shingled exterior, every rotted, off-the-shelf pine window, all the plumbing, the water filtration system,  the warped, wide-plank oak floors, and, perhaps most significant, the kitchen, which required new electrical wiring, mechanical systems, and lighting.

    “It started out a much simpler project than it ended up,” Mr. Stelle said. “I had hopes to refurbish the existing windows and that discussion with Jim lasted all of about 10 seconds. We ended up having to redo some structural oddities.” Because Mr. Avedon’s son was interested in Tibet, the basement had been converted into living quarters where Tibetan monks sometimes visited. “It was never waterproofedand very damp. We had to fix that. We basically took the entire house apart and put it back together again, with a better level of construction,” Mr. Stelle said.

    The house now has handsome teak floors with joints that are relatively impervious to the contractions and expansions of heat and water. Most important, however, the floors “match the spirit of the original house, which is crucial,” Mr. Stelle said. 

    Aside from the kitchen, which was renovated top to bottom, a significant change was a new staircase, which leads to the basement. A wall had surrounded the original staircase so when you came in through the front door, you were confronted by a door. Mr. Stelle designed a “floating” teak staircase with open risers. Now when you enter the house, there is an immediate and sweeping view down the hall to the sea. Ms. Stelle chose a color palette for the rooms subtly inspired by the ocean, and placed new and vintage pieces together.

     All the walls and ceilings are basically white, although “there is no such thing as ‘just white,’ ” Mr. Stelle acknowledged.  A large stone fireplace dominates the living room. A long, wooden table, simple but strong against the white walls, directs your attention to the water. The kitchen has a wooden table as well, flanked by wicker chairs. Floor-to-ceiling shelves hold stark white cookware and more colorful teapots and dishes.

    The bedrooms are straightforward and uncluttered, while the modern fixtures and hardware of the bathrooms are set against Thassos stone, a pure white marble.

     “The main emphasis is on comfort,” Mr. Stelle said. “Simple, open space, and comfort.”

    Guild Hall will present its annual Garden as Art tour on Saturday. Five gardens in the East Hampton area, each with “a profound aesthetic that celebrates the topography, climate, and light” of the South Fork, according to the cultural center, will be open to visitors.

    The event begins at 9:30 a.m. with breakfast and an illustrated lecture by the author and garden designer Jack de Lashmet on his new book, “Hamptons Gardens.” He will sign books after the talk, with the tour immediately following at noon.

    The gardens to be visited are those of Edwina von Gal, Anna Danieli, Barbara Goldsmith, and Priscilla Rattazzi and Chris Whittle, plus one on Middle Lane whose owner did not want to be identified.

    Ms. von Gal is a noted landscape designer. Her property in Springs, which shares the Accabonac Harbor view that inspired Jackson Pollock, is minimal, but highlights the native and natural beauty of its surroundings. She has a large vegetable and cutting garden, a studio, and a large expanse of salt marsh. Her outdoor art installations include a sculpture of blue glass pebbles by Maya Lin.

    Ms. Danieli has a two-acre, four-season garden designed by Oehme van Sweden in Springs, with expanses of grasses and low-maintenance perennials. Mature trees throughout the property serve as anchors and give definition to the landscape.  Edibles — figs, rhubarb, tomatoes, asparagus, and basil — also play a part. 

    Ms. Goldsmith’s garden was also designed by Mr. van Sweden, whose firm specializes in “the new American garden” style. It is set on a high ridge formed by a secondary dune. It includes trees and lawn trailing up to a steep slope where the house sits. The back of the dune is terraced with stone walls and planted with roses and perennials. A pool is surrounded by mass plantings of perennials and grasses.

    Briar Patch, the property of Ms. Rattazzi and Mr. Whittle, is reminiscent of the old Summer Colony cottages. On the eastern side of Georgica Pond, the 11-acre site has a view of the pond, Wainscott Beach, and the Atlantic. A focal point of the site are three tall linden trees set on a rolling lawn sloping down to the water. 

    Tickets start at $100 for the tour and breakfast.

There will be a related cocktail party, also to benefit Guild Hall, tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m. Tickets to that event begin at $300. It will take place in the garden of a house built on a bluff sits on a bluff, with the ocean on one side and Georgica Pond on the other. Benefactors  at the $500 level will be invited to lunch at a private house on Saturday from noon to 2 p.m. Both are sold out.

    Wisteria in flower evokes the most romantic garden fantasies. Monet planted it famously above a Japanese bridge in his water garden at Giverny, and of course painted it.

    You have to read the fine print to discover that while the vines he planted are still thriving, they literally tore down their supports. The reality is wisteria is high maintenance, very high maintenance, and 99.5 percent of us don’t have the know-how or resources to keep it under control and flowering, say, as in a Monet painting.

    Even Mike Dirr, the dean of woody plants in America, who may never have seen a tree or shrub he didn’t love, said wisteria can be a pernicious pest, strangling everything in its grasp. “Must be used with a certain amount of discretion and a commitment to proper culture and pruning,” is his restrained advice.

    The south-facing facade of Home, Sweet Home in East Hampton is covered with a beautifully trained wisteria that was reblooming at the end of July. Hugh King, the director of Home, Sweet Home, recalled that one year when the vines were not pruned, flowering was seriously compromised.

    Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania has a famous wisteria collection and I asked Mark Mosinski, the gardener responsible for it, for tips.

    First and foremost, when purchasing a vine, try to get it in flower. The rule of thumb is to purchase wisteria from a reputable source, but even that is not enough. The late Sir Peter Smithers, a great gardener, grew a collection of more than 20 different wisterias along the railing of the veranda that surrounded his house in Switzerland. He tells the story in his memoir of purchasing Black Dragon (very deep purple) from one of the foremost nurseries of his day. It took four years for the vine to reach the railing and another year for it to spread across the railing until it finally flowered — white! The steam still rises off the page of the letter of complaint the retired diplomat sent to the nursery owner.

    Interestingly, wisteria does not begin to flower profusely until it has expanded to the space allotted to it.

    Second, Mark Mosinski told me, to flower well wisteria requires full sun. So don’t kid yourself into thinking five or six hours a day is enough. If you don’t have full sun, select another vine, Clematis montana for instance, that isn’t so particular.

    If your wisteria does not flower and definitely is pruned properly and has full sun, there are other possibilities: Perhaps it was raised from seed, which invariably makes an inferior plant, or was grafted onto a seedling and the graft died, leaving the seedling as the vine. Mr. Mosinski doesn’t give much credence to suggestions that root pruning or tightening a wire around the vine to make it think it is being killed will promote flowering.

    At Longwood wisteria is pruned throughout the growing season to maintain its shape by removing the long shoots. In late winter, just before the buds begin to swell, the Longwood gardeners do their structural pruning, removing most of the previous season’s new growth. They even cut back spurs, or side shoots that have flowered, to three or four buds. Flower buds are thinned out so the racemes of flowers fall more freely for a better display. 

    Bringing a vine back to good condition and beauty after it has been neglected is situation-specific, Mr. Mosinski said. In some cases if the trunks are thick and appear to be dying, cut them back to the ground and train a few suckers as replacements. You might be able to remove some of the largest trunks and train younger branches. (The rule of thumb in pruning shrubs is to remove one-third of the oldest branches to the ground every year; modify this for an overgrown wisteria.) Prune so the vine looks like it hasn’t been pruned, he suggested.

    “Wisteria is a lot of work,” commented Mr. Mosinski. Removing suckers and runners are a constant project. Neglecting this is done at your peril: Runners have scaled a wall more than 50 feet away from a vine in East Hampton Village and new vines have quietly begun their own travels.

    The two American species of wisteria are less aggressive and thuggish than the Japanese and Chinese species, although Dr. Dirr said Wisteria frutescens is vigorous. W. frutescens Amethyst Falls was honored with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Gold Medal Award and has been popular at the garden club plant sale in recent years. Next year, I hope, we will have the Kentucky wisteria, W. macrostachys Clara Mack, which has fragrant white flowers in long racemes.

    Stories of wisteria bringing down stout wooden pergolas and arbors, not to mention towering trees, and my friend’s deck, are legion.

    If your romantic garden fantasies will be satisfied only by rows of fragrant, long racemes of wisteria dangling overhead, at least let the realist insist on a steel support.

    In 1980, two young hippies made their way east from Greenwich Village and bought a small house in Amagansett with an old Harley parked in the front hall. Every weekend for 31 years, this was Robert Strada and Michelle Murphy’s home away from home until 11 years ago when they became full-time residents and fulfilled a dream.

    A huge green spruce, its twin having been demolished by lightning, towers over the front yard and shields the house from the street. The Stradas recently completed a two-year renovation, maintaining the integrity of the original house, built in 1894 near Indian Wells beach by Capt. Sam Loper of the Life-Saving Service on government property. When he left the service in 1902, he moved the house to family property on Fresh Pond Road. Held up by trunks of locust trees, the house had stood its ground for 105 years when Mr. Strada, a designer and preservationist‚ took matters into his own hands.

     Today, after adding 910 square feet, the house has a spacious central hall and 14 rooms, not counting its five bathrooms. Mr. Strada kept to the original design while creating open spaces with family life in mind. It also has a screened-in porch, two patios, and a deep basement. Mr. Strada’s renovation juxtaposes the old and the new throughout the house.

     The couple’s older daughter has, in Mr. Strada’s words, “the best room in the house.” On the second floor of the old house, it faces west and has an unobstructed sunset view. Their other daughter’s room faces east, and has a large deck, called the sunbathing porch.

     Although the house had seven-foot ceilings, Mr. Strada said that “in the renovation we blew the ceilings out and up in the master bedroom. That was the place to do it.” The room’s height allowed an 1860 Napoleon III Lyre clock to be placed under a peak window, an architectural feature of 19th-century houses that is triangular at top.

     Ms. Murphy’s family history is evident throughout the house. A painter who studied art at the National Academy Museum & School of Fine Arts in New York, Ms. Murphy seems to have been destined for the visual arts. Paintings by her great-grandmother and great-aunt hang in the master bedroom, and her grandmother’s hope chest sits near the clock.

     A second-story deck off the master bedroom now serves as a porch. “We had a front porch, but we swapped it out for a bigger foyer and living room,” Ms. Murphy said. Mr. Strada’s craftsmanship is evident there in hand-carved roof brackets and moldings, as it is in other parts of the house.

    Downstairs, the foyer, or front hallway, is bright and airy. The central hall is new, as is the widened staircase. Framed illustrations that Ms. Murphy did for The New Yorker magazine hang in the hall, including one featuring a bodega that sells Optimo cigars in Sheridan Square, which is familiar to Greenwich Villagers. “It’s so welcoming now; the feng shui wasn’t good,” she said. “we gave up the front porch for this.”

     The couple each have workrooms on the first floor. “I love it in here,” Ms. Murphy said of her studio. She wanted a fireplace and a terrace, along with a sink and ample room for her files. Now she can work until late in the evening with her husband and one of her daughters, a high school student, nearby.

    Two paintings by the late Andrew Wyeth, on loan from Peter Marcelle, an art dealer who represents Ms. Murphy as well as Wyeth, are propped on the fireplace mantel for inspiration. Her own work in the studio includes portraits of her daughters and a detailed painting of her great-grandmother’s house, resting on an easel. Another painting, “Mrs. Halsey’s Horseshoes,” captures Water Mill, and a watercolor is of Jackson Pollock’s house in Springs.

     Mr. Strada has a small room of his own off the studio. It is packed with a 19th-century English desk and a 21st-century glass table from Italy, along with three chairs and a love seat he designed while living in Italy. “I like to work in confined spaces,” he said.

     The house seems to go on forever. The large living room, on the first floor, has a grand piano crowded with family pictures and shelves containing Ms. Murphy’s grandmother’s books, but the artwork in it is most memorable. A Hirschfeld drawing of a water show in Flushing Meadows that Ms. Murphy’s father staged for 12 years, the “Aquashow Squazanies and the Aquadorables,” is prominently displayed. In the opposite corner is a painting by Angelina Beloff, Diego Rivera’s first wife; the Stradas rescued it from an incinerator.

t was modeled on one the couple saw in Sag Harbor, although four-panel doors are more typical.

     In the dining room, the table is often set for eight, ready for a dinner party at a moment’s notice. The art includes an Andrew Wyeth over the fireplace, a Larry Rivers to its left, and a painting by Ms. Murphy, who uses the name Michelle Murphy professionally, is across the room. A portrait and a still life by her great-grandmother add to the ambience. Another work by Ms. Murphy, a still life, is of items such as a crocheted doily her grandmother made, and it hangs just over a table on which they are displayed. A page of The East Hampton Star is also in the painting.

     While the dining room is highly traditional, the kitchen has had a modern makeover. Light pours in through French doors, which lead to a patio next to a 130-year-old pear tree. There is plenty of cooking space, a utilitarian island, a six-burner, two-oven stove, two enormous sinks, glass-fronted cabinets, and marble counters.

     A pantry off the kitchen and other hallways feature family history, more art, and photos of friends. Relatives are seen in front of the Murphy family’s ancestral home in England. There is a Patti Smith photo of ballet slippers, a mirror from the Stradas’ brownstone in Manhattan, and a daughter’s electric and acoustic guitars. Near a door that Paul McCartney walked through in 1998 is a portrait he did of his wife, Linda. He gave the painting to the Stradas after her death, inscribing it, “To the folks next door!”

     A last-minute addition at the back of the house is a glass-enclosed, heated porch with long windows, which functions to bring in the outdoors all year. An old green dartboard with multicolored feathered darts, which came from the original Abercrombie and Fitch, hangs to one side.

   “Even though the kids were growing up, we wanted a place for everyone,” Mr. Strada said. To create more room, the house was lifted up and moved over so a deep basement could be dug. There are window wells that let in a subterranean glow, a music room for one daughter, a room with a plasma TV, and a collection of vintage Italian posters along the hall.

     Mr. Strada explained that a tarp in the backyard covers the deconstructed remains of a house from 1740 that he rescued in Sag Harbor, saving the beams, curved windows, and circular staircase. He and Richard Ward Baxter of Amagansett recently formed a design partnership committed to maintaining the history and architectural integrity of the East End.

     The partnership stemmed from “an absolute aversion to teardown mania,” Mr. Strada said. Their goal is to do everything they can “to see that this place doesn’t get destroyed.”