Habitat

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.

    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.

    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 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.

    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.

    The milkweed and butterfly weed in shades of pink, yellow, and orange have begun their dazzling annual two-month magic show at the Mimi Meehan Native Plant Garden, between Clinton Academy and The East Hampton Star on Main Street.

    From the trilliums and other woodland plants of early spring to the asters, goldenrod, scarlet-streaked switch grass, and fragrant yellow witch hazel flowers in the autumn, there is color, texture, and interest in the garden for at least eight months of the year. But this small backyard town garden is at its flamboyant best at high summer.

    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.

When Glenn Leitch saw the house in Springs, he was smitten. “It was in pretty bad shape then, and most people would have torn it down,” he said. But he “loved the lines of it. It reminded me of Jackson Pollock’s house.”

Dressed for the season in brown burlap, striking dramatic poses all around town like models on a runway, hundreds of shrubs and trees stand bundled root to crown in their protective winter coats, ready for whatever Jack Frost can throw at them. (Photos by Durell Godfrey)

An addition to a Wainscott house gave one architect the challenge of extending another's Modernist barn.

Gardening worldwide is undergoing a sea change as ecological considerations become more influential in our garden-making decisions.

After reading a real estate article in The New York Times last winter titled “Hamptons House: Make Mine New” on the increasing trend toward teardowns and the voracious demand for new construction on the South Fork, David Berridge was so incensed that he drafted a 350-word screed to local brokers, suggesting what he called a “more enlightened approach to our changing landscape.”



“I do not have an objection to new, so much as the lack of critical thinking in the type and size of house being built and the dismissive view that it is okay to just keep knocking down the old a

The dean of Yale University’s School of Architecture lives on a well-traveled road north of the highway in East Hampton, next door to a construction site where, after his attempt to buy the lot fell through, a nondescript house is going up.

His own house, still modest at about 2,000 square feet after extensive renovations, began life as a run-of-the-mill ranch. “I bought a three-room house at a fiscally deprived time, in 1978,” he said. “It was a nothing house. I kept thinking, this will be a halfway moment and then I’ll move on.

Even years later, James Merrell likes nothing more than returning to the houses he designed.

Stepping inside a Sagaponack oceanfront house one recent afternoon, Mr. Merrell, its architect, didn’t focus on anything he might have done differently. Rather, he thought back to the time when the glass-and-granite house was taking shape, and even farther, to when it was only lines scratched on a piece of paper. He also thought about the neccessary decisions that swallowed up the better part of two years — from 2008 to 2010.



“I like going back to places.

Monica Graham has always been fascinated by the idea of a Gertrude Stein salon, to which visitors were drawn by master works of art. In her own way, she has put together a compound with masterly gardens and indoor amenities to which her many relatives and friends are drawn.



There are actually three gardens – a multi-level water garden with a rivulet, koi ponds, and small waterfalls, a formal, enclosed garden with a fountain, and a woodland garden.

    Were George Washington alive today, he wouldn’t have to apologize for cutting down the cherry tree: He would repurpose it. That’s what Susan Goldstein did with two cherry trees that were in decline on her North Haven property, one of which was more than 100 years old. Instead of letting the wood end up in a landfill, she challenged Will Paulson, a Mattituck cabinetmaker, to find uses for it.

Every nook and cranny in Ann Sutphen's North Haven house is filled with history, although like most old houses, it has been revamped and added to over the decades. She is either the sixth generation of her family to live on what was once known as “Sayre’s Lot,” or the eighth, depending on how you look at it.

    East Hampton may seem a long way from Michigan but for someone like Jill Lasersohn, who grew up on a farm near Lake Huron, the landscape looks remarkably like home. And like her childhood Christmases, Ms.

    A modest bungalow dating from 1911 on Cooper Lane in East Hampton is populated by pictures and objects that have been found at galleries, yard sales, and thrift shops. Before the owner, an architect and interior designer, takes anything home, he asks, “Does it speak to me? Is there a quality that’s interesting or amusing or wonderful? Or is it unbelievably awful?” He collects for each of those reasons.



    The show begins in the house’s driveway, which, in a kitsch salute to the traditional cannonball lawn ornament, Alan J.

While much grander houses have sprung up around it in the 53 years since Tinka and the late Bud Topping transformed an 1811 barn in Sagaponack into a family home, none of them speak as much to place and history.



Mr. Topping’s family roots in Sagaponack stretch back to the 17th century, and the house is on family land where he grew up farming potatoes with his father.



“I used to see this road and say, that is the most beautiful road,” Ms. Topping recalled late last month.

If these walls could talk. . . . It’s a cliché everyone has heard, but when you’re dealing with lumber salvaged from a 170-year-old textile factory in Eufaula, Ala., a 19th-century barn in Elizabethton, Tenn., or a 200-year-old barn from Greencastle, Pa., that cliché takes on a whole different meaning.

Collectors usually start small before letting loose their acquisitiveness. In an extreme example, one might begin with brick-size viewing stones — Japanese suiseki — that can look like tiny mountain ranges, perhaps paired with bonsai to make miniature landscapes, before moving on to larger stones, big enough to sit on, amid raked sand.

A sandcastle, cruise ship, discotheque, and whitewashed house on a Greek island all come to mind, although the vernacular is mid-20th century modern. Without question, the owners have spent this summer in one of the most remarkable oceanfront houses on the South Fork. They call its design timeless. 

The 2,400-square-foot house has made Beach Hampton beach walkers buzz for almost 30 years, since 1986, when it reared its stucco walls, barrel-like roofs, and porthole windows, disrupting the parade of modest wood-clad buildings.

The house shared by Liz Robbins, a well-known Washington lobbyist, and her husband, Doug Johnson, a former news anchor for WABC-TV, reveals itself gradually. Though in the estate area of the Village of East Hampton, it isn’t visible from the street, hidden not by manicured hedges but by a profusion of shrubbery and trees. A short gravel drive leads to an inauspicious parking area. The front door is all but hidden by climbing roses, which cover the shingled facade and were in bloom on a recent visit.

Deep in the woods near Crooked Pond in Sag Harbor, where he lives and works, Nico Yektai took a break recently to consider what had given rise to his creative bent. “The idea that furniture could be just like sculpture, or painting, seemed very natural to me,” the artist-craftsman said. He referred again and again to the towering influence of his father, the Abstract Expressionist Manoucher Yektai.



Mr. Yektai works primarily in wood, which was leaned against or stacked amid power tools and work tables, and uses concrete, too.

    For the garden that has everything, or so you thought, you can always give it a pond. Not everyone has a water view even though the East End is surrounded by water, but it is possible to create your own by building a pond. And many do.



    There’s something romantic about a pond: the lily pads, the scurry of fish, the croaking of frogs. So-called water features, which now ornament many a South Fork estate, come in many shapes and sizes.

NOT JUST DESSERT

The original of this replica on tin was made for a royal banquet in London in 1851. Charming enough to go on a wall, serve petit fours to 10-year-olds, or for picnics. Other patterns available. Not for the dishwasher. $12. The Monogram Shop, 11 Newtown Lane, East Hampton.



 

Posts and beams, roughly hewn some 500 years ago and showing adze strikes still, have a suitable new home, an unpretentious second home resembling a hunting lodge, what with its ample wood paneling, stuffed game birds, paintings of foxes and hounds and fly-fishing streams, fireplace just right for a curled-up English spaniel, and suggestive of cigars, snifters of brandy, long guns propped in a corner.

   Gardening, so it is said, is the manipulation of nature. However, some of the most electric, as well as subtle, compositions within a garden can occur through happenstance: The gardener introduces a packet of seed or a seedling given by a friend and nature takes over, often for decades afterward. It is the gift that keeps on giving.

    The golden California poppies in a sunny area in Calista Washburn’s East Hampton garden, for example, originated from a packet of seed scattered years ago.

Don and Kathy Ashby first saw the house at 177 Main Street in East Hampton in the spring of 2012 as prospective buyers of what they might find at a tag sale. Mr. Ashby, a fashion photographer, collects books and photographs, and the house, which has been known as Congress Hall for more than a century, had been vacant for about two years after the death of its last owner.



At the time, the couple were living in a house they had renovated seven years earlier on Bluff Road in Amagansett.