Habitat

When Robert and Jeanette Schwagerl purchased the house on Quail Hill in Amagansett in 1989, it had been for the most part abandoned. “I was going to tear it down,” Mr. Schwagerl said during a recent tour. Within a year, he had designed a new house and hired Ed Hollander, a landscape architect, to plan the grounds.



But the Schwagerls soon fell in love with the existing house and abandoned the idea of demolishing it. Over the years they made a few cosmetic changes, but by 2010, with two teenaged children. Mr.

Why do people put frames around art? Aestheticians probably have Freudian answers, but obviously it has something to do with heightening the effect. Now the local architects Robert Barnes and Christopher Coy have done just that to one of the finest views in Amagansett, the vista from the top of the ridge that rises just as Route 27 leaves Amagansett for Montauk.

The deep, rectangular frame that makes up the entire oceanfront side of the new house is a full two stories high.

“I want visitors to go further and further down the rabbit hole.” So said the artist Dianne Blell as she introduced a visitor to the evocative mixture of objects, colors, passions, and practicality in both the garden and interior of her house in Bridgehampton. Her second-home world reflects the aesthetic of her art — meticulous photographs that comment on grown-up fairy tales ranging from classic myths to haute couture.



Once upon a time (24 years ago), she spotted the house from a real estate agent’s car.

When Don Lenzer and Bettina Volz set out to renovate their aging quasi-saltbox in the almost rain forest-dense Amagansett woods north of Montauk Highway, a search led them across the country to a completely different landscape, the desert inferno of Phoenix, and a company called ASUL, which stands for Adaptable System for Universal Living.

Preserving and loving a house on land granted in 1650 to William Mulford, one of the original East Hampton settlers, filled with shabby-chic furnishings and treasured mementos of family life.

    Tucked away in East Hampton’s Georgica Estates condominium community, a light, bright, and airy house is aglow with the vivid colors of a formidable collection of midcentury American ceramics.



    For Max Pine and Lois Mander, who bought their house in 2003, the joy is in the objects themselves rather than their historic or monetary value.