126 South Midway Road

Three buildings on 0.90 acres at the south end of Shelter Island, dated by the record to two campaigns: the main house in 1999, the art studio and the casita in 2006. South Midway Road runs down to the water, and Wades Beach, one of the town's beaches on Shelter Island Sound, carries the address 114. This compound is 126.

David Rankin and Lily Brett first saw the island in 1992, visiting friends, and afterward took a cottage on Midway Road. Rankin was born in Plymouth in 1946, came to Australia at two, and grew up in country New South Wales; he is self-taught, first showed in Sydney at twenty-two through Watters Gallery, and won the Wynne Prize, Australia's landscape prize, in 1983. He and Brett moved to New York in 1989. From 1995 to 2000 he painted in a rough room above a village storefront on the island. The 1,400 square foot studio on this property went up in 2006, and it is the Midway Road studio the Shelter Island Reporter found him working in, its walls hung with tall abstractions built from Australian and East Asian marks.

Brett writes novels, poems and essays. Her first collection of poems appeared in 1986 with Rankin's drawings. Lola Bensky, drawn from her years as a music journalist in the 1960s, when she interviewed Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, took the Prix Medicis etranger in 2014, and Too Many Men reached the screen in 2024 as Treasure, with Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry. In 2021 both were awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia, his for service to the visual arts, hers for service to literature. Rankin has held more than one hundred solo exhibitions, and the critic Dore Ashton wrote two books on his work.

The main house holds 3,400 square feet over three levels: four bedrooms, an open kitchen, a library, a den, a fireplace, and a finished lower level. Wood cladding and wide glass on the elevations, hardwood floors inside, central air throughout, private well and private septic. The casita adds 1,140 square feet and two more bedrooms with their own doors to the outside, which brings the compound to six bedrooms, four full baths and two half baths across 4,540 square feet, in the relaxed modernism of the East End beach houses.

Between the buildings, a heated in-ground pool set in an L, decks stepping off the house on more than one side, and water to the south. Rankin, on what the place has produced: "Over a dozen of Lily's books were written in our home." Offered at 126 South Midway Road with Jenny Landey and Maz Crotty of Sotheby's International Realty.

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