Design: Sherrills Seek A Simpler Life

When Edwin L. and Peggy Sherrill first met in 1984 at Home, Sweet Home, the East Hampton Village museum, he had been widowed four years and she was in the process of a divorce.

Two years later, when they married, Mrs. Sherrill and her two daughters moved from their ranch house on Conklin Terrace in the village to Mr. Sherrill's large house at 5 Hither Lane.

The Hither Lane house had been built in 1962 to serve not only as home for the Sherrill family, which included two boys, but as an office for Mr. Sherrill's wife, Dr. Doris Zenger, a pediatrician who died in 1981. It sat on four acres once owned by Mr. Sherrill's father, Edwin L. Sherrill Sr., a dairy farmer.

"The Sherrills had farm lots all over the place - on Fireplace, Egypt. Even the Evan Frankel house up the road was once part of the Sherrill estate," Mr. Sherrill said.

Too Much

"The thought of living there seemed kind of surreal because we'd been there so often to visit Dr. Zenger," Mrs. Sherrill said recently. "But it was a wonderful large home that accommodated both of our families, and Ed let me put my mark on it," she said.

Soon, though, all the children were gone and the house and grounds proved too much.

"I guess you could say the place outgrew us," said Mr. Sherrill, a mild-mannered man who will be 75 this summer.

Referring to the surrounding properties on Hither and Amy's Lanes, Mrs. Sherrill said, "All the places around us were groomed to the nines and we were doing all the work ourselves. Ed would start mowing and trimming Monday morning and by the time he'd finish he'd have to start all over again. It consumed our lives," Mrs. Sherrill said.

Compact But Flowing

In 1992 they put the house and some of the land on the market, and made plans to build on a half-acre parcel next door, one of three he kept for himself and his sons.

Mrs. Sherrill pored through shelter magazines, and found a design for a shingle-style cottage they both liked. They hired Ernie Dayton as contractor, started building in 1993, and moved in 1994.

The new house is compact at 1,473 square feet but the space flows remarkably well.

The entrance foyer, for instance, is minute, but, because it has a cathedra-height ceiling, it is not cramped. The off-center placement of the front door, adjacent to the second floor staircase, allowed this.

Open Plan

The 17-by-14-foot living room has built-in bookcases, a fireplace, and French doors that lead outdoors to a deck used for dining. The room connects to a kitchen and dining area in an open-floor plan. The master bedroom suite is downstairs and has a spacious compartmented bathroom with a linen closet.

Two more rooms upstairs flow off an open landing, an area Mr. Sherrill uses as an office. A naval architect and model boat builder, Mr. Sherrill has filled the space with nautical artifacts. Most treasured are models of two fishing trawlers that he owned in his early days as a commercial fisherman.

A two-car garage and a studio over it have replaced the workshop Mr. Sherrill had in the other house, where he once built furniture and overhauled boats. The couple shares the double-height studio, which was not in the original plans.

Shared Space

Mr. Sherrill builds his model boats here, and Mrs. Sherrill, a student of the American decorative arts, works on reverse paintings on glass and carefully stenciled trays. Her work requires a dust-free atmosphere, so Mr. Sherrill does all his sanding in the garage.

Spacious, sunny, and informal, the couple call the studio the FROG, (Favorite Room Over Garage). When children and grandchildren visit, everyone congregates here. Mrs. Sherrill misses the large living room of the old house, but says the studio makes up for it.

One of the reasons the scaled-down house is successful is that it is uncluttered.

Of the furnishings, Mrs. Sherrill said, "Everything was too oversized and there was too much of it so we gave almost everything to the children and started from scratch." This included a rare Dominy tall clock.

Family Matters

But many things remain to give the house character. Old photographs, drawings, plates, other things with a family connection hang on a wall. There is an old Dominy candlestand and a rope bed from Mrs. Sherrill's side of the family, Grandma Zenger's high chair is in the dining area, and old Sherrill Dairy milk bottles are in the mud room.

The kitchen has a special touch too. Mrs. Sherrill, who studied quilting, designed the tile work over the stove following an 18th-century basket pattern with a sawtooth edge. Old working decoys from both families sit on cabinet tops.

"Do you know what we did when we first met each other?" Mrs. Sherrill asked a visitor. "We both went home and consulted our copies of Jeannette Rattray's 'East Hampton History and Genealogies.' "

Simpler Life

Mrs. Sherrill is a 13th generation Edwards, a family which, like the Sherrills, was among the village's early settlers. Her husband is of the ninth generation of Sherrills here.

What delights the couple most is that Mrs. Sherrill's grandfather, Herbert Nathaniel (Captain Bert) Edwards, was a friend of Mr. Sher rill's father.

"Isn't that wonderful?" she asked.

"We're very happy here," said Mrs. Sherrill, who is 55 and recently retired from her part-time job at the East Hampton Main Street clothing shop Mark, Fore and Strike, where she designed the windows and interior displays.

"We wanted a simpler life."

Two errors crept into a prior column about the Seegal family's house in the Tyson compound on Further Lane, Amagansett. Perla Gray was a close family friend, not a niece, of Caroline Tyson and the name Baker was used inadvertently rather than Simons in one reference to the house.

The sentence should have read: "In 1991 the Simons house came back on the market and the Seegals leapt for it."