Stay Awhile At This Luxurious Vacation Compound In Southampton

The parents live on one continent. One of their grown sons and his own family live on another. The other son and his crew make their home in New York. But the big, far-flung group wanted to spend summers under one roof. So the parents bought a piece of waterfront land in a quiet corner of Southampton, on the South Fork of Long Island, New York, and commissioned Bates Masi + Architects to build a house that could accommodate everyone, approximately 10 people—often more when guests join the gatherings.

But it wouldn’t be just any house. With so many people involved—spanning three generations, with the children ranging widely in age—the program grew to be extensive, eventually including an indoor pool, a gym with a sauna and steam room, communal home office, home theater, playroom, and guest bedrooms. Accommodating it all would involve a staggering amount of square footage. “The challenge was how to integrate this program into the landscape,” recalls Interior Design Hall of Fame member Paul Masi, who cofounded the local firm with the late Harry Bates, devising homes that live lightly on the land. The solution for him and Bates Masi partner Aaron Weil sprang from “the idea of weaving,” Masi adds.

A Home By Bates Masi + Architects and Bart Verhelle Interiorarchitect

Rising only two stories but encompassing nearly 18,000 square feet and resting on a stone plinth so it’s lifted above the flood plain, the home’s interiors and exterior are indeed woven together in a patchwork. It is divided into five glass-sided sections with terraces and courtyards in between—like the courtyard on the north side of the house that leads to the front door. And with each section bordered on three sides by open areas, the interiors gain maximum daylight, cross-ventilation, and views. “With the doors open, indoor and outdoor are all connected into one,” Weil explains.

The outdoor spaces aren’t only on the ground level, either. The upper level cantilevers over the lower, providing room on the second floor for outdoor showers and intimate decks enclosed by screens made of live-edge cedar boards. The cantilever also shades and shelters portions of the ground-floor open areas, which are outfitted with lighting, radiant heating, and cooking equipment so they can be in use—and members of the family outside—even when the sun goes down or the temperature drops. An expansive terrace of Italian Repen marble skirts the south-facing rear of the house, extending the living space out into the landscape.

Embrace Quiet Luxury In This Vacation Compound

The same marble was used liberally inside too, helping tie the expansive house together and to its setting. The stone—which has “subtle, muted” veining, Weil notes—is found on ground-level flooring, a towering fireplace in the double-height living/dining room, and in the steam room, where it’s finished three ways: flamed for walls, honed for seating, sandblasted for floor. Elsewhere inside, Bart Verhelle Interiorarchitect, a Belgian firm that had worked with the clients on previous residences, took the lead in specifying furnishings and collaborated on finishes. Director Bart Verhelle chose lime plaster for walls and the enclosure of a spiral staircase leading from the underground parking area to the two guest bedrooms. In the kitchen, the plaster merges nearly seamlessly with a sleek Corian backsplash. Oak was used for stair treads and upstairs flooring. The limited palette of materials creates a calm, neutral backdrop that “at the same time, radiates sufficient character,” Verhelle says.

A sophisticated selection of furnishings adds to the feeling of quiet luxury. Some pieces—such as slender aluminum pendant fixtures by Michael Anastassiades and comfy sofas by Francesco Binfaré—are used repeatedly. Verhelle also designed a few items himself, including an 18-foot-long walnut dining table that provides plenty of room for everyone in this clan—plus a couple of guests—to gather round. Eight so-called Hand Grenade pendants, designed in 1952 by Alvar Aalto for the Finnish Engineers’ Association Building in Helsinki, light the table from above.

The understated setting focuses attention on views of the landscape as well as on the owners’ prized pieces of art. It also allows the life of the family to take center stage, which, after all, was the whole point of the house in the first place. Upstairs, four bedrooms and baths for the grandkids are clustered in their own wing, encouraging cousins to bond during summers together. Another wing is devoted to two suites for the sons and their wives. The eldest members of the family have their own domain, of course. The house was carefully designed to accommodate them as they age, with thresholds that are level with floors and an elevator tucked inconspicuously away—all to ensure that they can comfortably use the house, and join in all the fun, not only now but for many years to come.

Walk Around This Vacation Compound On Long Island

BATES MASI + ARCHITECTS: RYAN BERRY. MICHAEL BOUCHER LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT: LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT. RADIANCE LIGHTING: LIGHTING DESIGN. SL MARESCA & ASSOCIATES CONSULTING ENGINEERS: STRUCTURAL ENGINEER. DULA: WOODWORK. MEN AT WORK CONSTRUCTION: GENERAL CONTRACTOR.

FROM FRONT EDRA: SECTIONALS (LIVING AREA, THEATER). CONDEHOUSE CO.: CHAIRS (DINING AREA). ARTEK: PENDANT FIXTURES. MICHAEL ANASTASSIADES: PENDANT FIXTURES (STAIRWAYS). BENCHMARK: STOOLS (KITCHEN). MIYAZAKI CHAIR: ARMCHAIRS. DuPONT: CORIAN BACKSPLASH. ARCWAYS: CUSTOM STAIR (GUEST STAIR). BASSAM FELLOWS: STOOLS (POOL BAR). SUTHERLAND: CHAIRS (DECK). AGAPECASA: TABLE. KASTHALL: CARPET (THEATER). PROFILS: PANELING. MINOTTI: SIDE TABLE. BOFFI: TUB (BATH­ROOM). OUTDOOR SHOWER COMPANY: OUTDOOR SHOWER. THROUGHOUT SPARK: CUSTOM FIREPLACES. LEVOLUX: WOOD SIDING. POLICH TALLIX: METAL SIDING. SCHUCO: CUSTOM DOORS, CUSTOM WINDOWS. BENJAMIN MOORE & CO.: PAINT.

SheltonMindel Designs a Miami Home Fit for Beach Days

Every story has a backstory. The Florida condominium Interior Design Hall of Fame member Lee F. Mindel shares with his work/life partner, José Marty, is a tale of lucky strikes emerging from downbeat situations. The plot unspools as the SheltonMindel founder and architectural designer were awaiting takeoff from New York to Miami for a project meeting, when their client canceled last-minute. They flew south anyway, then were forced to quarantine there as COVID hit. The city was effectively dead, Mindel recalls. “It was doom and gloom.”

Given the Mindel’s art-world ties—he is a chairman of the Design Basel and Design Miami vetting committees and owns Galerie56 in TriBeCa—it’s no surprise the place hosts enviable pieces. Though precious price-wise, they portray a breezy insouciance. A neon “MIA” at entry might be taken for the city’s nickname but is really part of a 1940’s sign sourced in Helsinki. Furthering the upbeat vibe there is Kate Shepherd’s Endless Summer, in Miami Vice hot-pink tones. Hanging on the floor-to-ceiling oak divider separating living and guest areas, Gisela Colon’s dimensional acrylic sculpture resembles “something you might see under the sea,” Mindel says. A diminutive Josef Albers work rests oh-so-casually on the oak kitchen’s counter. Big and bold in the adjoining dining zone are Domingos Tótora’s pressed-paper circular construction and a piece by Seymour Fogel, and the beachy guest chamber displays Rupert Deese’s oil-on-plywood disc recalling raked sand. Even the main bathroom gets the art treatment: Nightshop’s round P.O.V. in resin, acrylic, and ink.

A Miami Abode Designed to Spotlight Art and Color

cassina: sofa (living area), sofas, table (balcony)

through galerie kreo studio: cocktail table (living area)

through friedman benda: chair

Chilewich: floor mat

bitossi: vase

kartell: stool (living area), side tables (main bedroom)

the future perfect: floor lamp (living area), stool (bathroom)

artek: stools (balcony)

molteni&c: cabinetry (kitchen)

marc krusin: table (dining area)

cappellini: stools

venini: glass artwork

galerie jacques lacoste: panels (main bedroom)

miniera: floor lamp (main bedroom)

pierre marie giraud: table lamps (bedrooms, foyer)

Tom Dixon: stools (bedroom)

Bates Masi + Architects and David Kleinberg Design Associates Create a Contemporary East Hampton Estate

2022 Best of Year Winner for Beach House

Well before the East End of Long Island, New York, became known for shingle-style mega mansions, its residential vernacular was the saltbox, a simple two-story volume with a gable roof that comes closer to the ground in the back than in the front. Bates Masi + Architects decided it was the right form to give a new 11,450-square-foot weekend house for a couple and their family on a large plot of land in East Hampton. The clients asked for three semi-attached buildings, one for themselves and one each for their grown children (and their future progeny). Firm principal and Interior Design Hall of Fame member Paul Masi gravitated to the saltbox shape, so that the structures would feel protected from the elements in the back but wide open in the front, where the higher rooflines accommodate two stories of windows, all offering spectacular Atlantic Ocean views.

Masi’s other big move was to arrange the three pavilions in an L-shape, which provides a sense of enclosure around the yard and swimming pool. The saltboxes are joined by glass connectors, but only at ground level; each has its own staircase to second-floor bedrooms and baths. The architect relied almost entirely on five materials: cedar, which clads most of the exterior; oak, for much of the interior; limestone, for floors, countertops, terraces, and some external walls; darkened bronze, for various kinds of trim; and, of course, glass. “We had to limit the palette because the house is so big,” Masi explains. “You lose the essence of it if there’s too much going on.” This ethos harks back to the early 1980s, when firm founder and fellow Hall of Famer Harry Bates—now 94 and retired—built modest beach houses out of whatever he could find in local lumber yards, a necessary discipline that became part of the firm’s DNA. When Masi joined Bates in 1998, he began devising ways to keep things simple even as clients demanded more and more luxury.

This couple, intending that the property becomes a family heirloom passed down from generation to generation, wanted to make sure it would last. That was fine with Masi, who thought in centuries rather than decades while designing it. “We put a lot of redundancy into the building envelope,” he explains, noting that the house is sheathed in two layers of shingle-like boards with gutters and leaders sandwiched between them to keep water away from the weathertight shell. The cedar is fastened to the structure with custom stainless-steel clips that don’t penetrate the wood, avoiding the damage nails or screws could cause the boards when they expand and contract.

The architect didn’t make things easy for himself. Exterior walls and roofs, identically clad, meet without even a whiff of an overhang. Exposing the transition from one surface to another means there’s nowhere to hide even the smallest flaw. “It’s harder than it looks to pull that off,” Masi admits. “Everything has to be perfect.” That includes four “light chimneys,” his term for a series of massive bronze-clad skylights that project through the roof. They ensure light “cascades down through the stairwells,” he continues, an effect that’s enhanced by open-tread staircases hanging on thin vertical steel-and-oak struts that descend from the second-floor ceiling. The stairwells double as ideally illuminated display areas for larger pieces of art (the couple are passionate collectors). And where the house turns a 90-degree angle, the nearly cubic 18-by-18-foot glass-enclosed connector space serves as a sculpture gallery. Delicate cedar-slat screens provide necessary shade, while large, operable windows make it easy getting lage artworks in and out of the space.

The clients brought in Interior Design Hall of Fame member David Kleinberg to furnish the house. The founding partner of David Kleinberg Design Associates, who has worked on multiple residences for the same couple before, softened the vast main living area with a custom beige wool rug. Much of the furniture is upholstered in shades of gray, including custom club chairs and sofas and a pair of French 1950’s oak lounge chairs. The seating is gathered around two Fredrikson Stallard cast-acrylic coffee tables that sit on the rug like massive chunks of ice. A patinated-bronze and polished-copper suspended light sculpture by Niamh Barry adds a note of drama overhead.

But Kleinberg has no desire to hog credit for this house. “It’s clear that architecture was the highest priority,” he notes. “The artworks were second in importance. And then came the furnishings, which were to be laid back, relaxed, and supportive of the architecture and art.” What Kleinberg doesn’t mention is that many of the pieces he has so carefully curated could well become heirlooms in their own right.

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katherine dalene weil, nick darin, nick braaksma, hung fai tang: bates masi + architects

lance duckett scott: david kleinberg design associates

orsman design: lighting consultant

steven maresca: structural engineer

men at work construction: general contractor

awg art advisory: art consultant

perry guillot: landscape consultant

maison gerard: oak lounge chairs, light sculpture (living area)

david gill gallery: coffee tables

Patterson Flynn: custom rug

joseph walsh studio: custom table (dining area)

victoria + albert: tub (bathroom)

apparatus: pendant fixtures (kitchen)

wolf: range (kitchen)

vent-a-hood: ventilation hood

sub-zero: refrigerator

bernd goeckler: glass table (sculpture gallery)

bybee stone company: limestone flooring and cladding

Keller Minimal Windows: windows and doors

This SoHo Loft by Lee F. Mindel is Anything But Soulless

2021 Best of Year winner for Large Apartment

You’d never guess that, before Lee F. Mindel came on the scene, this airy SoHo loft, home to a young art consultant, was a soulless, cookie-cutter three-bedroom in a new development. The firm principal blasted open the 4,400-square-foot floor plan—replacing Sheetrock with white-lacquered panels, white-oak partitions, and glass pocket doors—to instate more gracious spatial proportions and flowier circulation. Mindel’s strategy for giving grandeur to the standard-issue anodized-aluminum windows was to “thicken” the walls around them and darken their boxy depth in a manner reminiscent of Donald Judd sculptures. The result is akin to “dioramas framing views of the neighboring cast-iron historic buildings,” the Interior Design Hall of Fame member explains. “Plus, the added depth creates the illusion you’re in a masonry building.” Eschewing drop ceiling and downlights in favor of exposing the full volume of the space, Mindel installed luminous LED blades—rectangular in the living room, circular in the dining area—that lend activation overhead. “The idea,” the architect notes, “was that the ceiling, with these De Stijl–like overlapping graphics, become its own artistic plane.” Other than the living room’s Pierre Paulin sofa and the Maarten Baas dining chairs, furnishings are custom, designed by the firm to suit the newly salonlike spaces.

sheltonmindel: Lee F. Mindel

Andrew Berman Architect Creates A Brooklyn Sculpture Studio Fit for Boulders

Barry X Ball isn’t just an acclaimed artist. He is also a collector. Over the years, he has amassed an impressive cache of stone monoliths that will someday become inspired figurative sculptures exhibited internationally (his work is currently on view at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, Italy). The problem with acquiring multi-ton hunks of rock, though, is where to put them. At just 2,500 square feet, his studio in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, couldn’t hold them; it was already bursting at the seams with him and his team of artists and technicians. So he kept the blocks in storage facilities around the globe, which meant that whenever he started a new work, he would fly to Italy or Mexico or California, select a stone, and ship it back to the city. After two decades, it was getting old. Enter architect Andrew Berman. 

Ball’s dream was to have his entire process—from stone storage through artwork fabrication—under one roof. But no existing facility could meet his specific needs—nor his exacting standards. That is until he found an existing two-story warehouse in nearby Greenpoint. Shortly after, the Andrew Berman Architect team immersed themselves in Ball’s artistic practice, ultimately conceiving a 16,000-square-foot studio for him that checks all the boxes and then some. 

First, the warehouse was shored-up and reconfigured to house a gallery, digital design studio, offices, pantries, and bathrooms. “So much of what we work on are found structures that we’re taking from their first or second  use to a new, totally unanticipated one,” Berman begins. “There’s beauty in the original conception of buildings that they can have these other lives.” Then, ABA added a three-story, steel-clad volume that contains a double-height fabrication hall and opens onto a courtyard where Ball’s stone collection is stored.

The layout was designed with one thing in mind: function. “It began with a semi tractor trailer,” Berman states. “We mapped out how a truck with a 20-ton stone or crated sculpture would be able to get onto the property, through the gate and doors, and physically back into the studio, where a crane could take the delivery off the truck.” Physical requirements, such as hallways wide enough for a forklift to move a sculpture from fabrication hall to gallery or clear spans to accommodate two 20-ton gantry cranes that can move stones around the fabrication hall and storage terrace, were balanced with less tangible ones. How does staff enter the studio and does that sequence need to be different for visitors, or for Ball himself? How are clean, dry areas kept separate from wet, dirty ones, and how can the mess be contained while people move back and forth? How can the building be tuned to ensure the most efficient workflow at each point in the fabrication process? “These scenarios were drawn out and overlayed, so it became a Rubik’s cube of spaces that had to all flow naturally,” Berman continues.

Outside, the charcoal-toned cladding of the existing structure contrasts with the bright corrugated steel of the addition. But inside, the palette is the same throughout: Impeccably white walls, fixtures, and furniture frame polished gray concrete flooring. Variation comes in the grade of materials: heavier-duty Sheetrock for rooms that take more abuse, a lighter-weight concrete mix for the upper levels than the ground, where flooring is engineered to withstand 20-ton point loads as well as a stone-cutting bandsaw and other heavy equipment.

Natural daylight filters through the folding doors and clerestories of the fab­rication hall and through the windows and skylights added to the existing structure, reaching even those spaces set deep within the floor plate. The monochrome interior “maximizes the clarity of the light and its ability to bounce, reflect, and refract,” Berman notes. “It also helps focus one’s eye to Barry’s work, which taps and extracts the inner colors of the stone itself.”

A verdant point of departure is the third-floor penthouse that spans the old and new structures and opens out onto a lush green roof with panoramic views of the Manhattan skyline. The flexible space is currently used for quiet work as well as events but zoned as, and has all the amenities of, a studio apartment that can host visiting artists, staff, or Ball himself, as needed. 

Despite its utilitarian nature and expression, “In many ways, the fabrication hall was the most demanding, architecturally, because nearly everything in it is exposed,” ABA senior project manager Dan Misri explains. “Every weld, every bolt was thought through.” And it isn’t just the structural decking and beams that are exposed, all the systems are, too. “The piping for the water and electrical, a compressed air system—all are very tailored to help foster not just the usability but also the structural aesthetic,” Berman adds. “The exposure elevates the work space.”

For Ball, the specific and bespoke nature of the studio is already allowing for evolution. “Being able to walk among rows of giant blocks, move them around, and see how what’s inside changes the form of the thing that you’re making is radically renewing for me,” he says. “The work that we’re doing now literally could not have been made in my old studio.” And the parallels between the architectural process and his artistic one were hard to miss. “Everybody’s got The Fountainhead idea of architects making brilliant maneuvers, but it’s like my work: Thousands of little details, cumulatively, make something sing.” 

Andrew Berman Architect: Mariko Tsunooka; Natalie Wong; Otis Berkin

Gilsanz Murray Steficek: Structural Engineer

Plus Group Consulting Engineering: Mep

Pillori Associates: Civil Engineer

Tada: Owner Representative

Richter+Ratner: Construction Manager

Selux: Pendant Fixtures (Digital Area)

Tri-Boro: Custom Shelving, Custom Storage

Nuvo: Track Fixtures

Ardex Americas: Flooring

Morin: Steel Cladding (Facade)

Fleetwood: Sliding Doors

Extech: Poly­carbonate Cladding

Bator: Folding Entry Doors

Skyline Windows: Windows

benjamin moore & co.: Paint