Behind thirty years of hedges
A shingled farmhouse of 1994 on 2.2 acres of Sagaponack Road, in the flat, hedged country south of the Montauk Highway where Bridgehampton runs toward the ocean. The hedges here have had three decades to grow in, and the house sits unseen from the road. Six bedrooms and four and a half baths across roughly 4,000 square feet, scaled like the older farmhouses the style remembers: two living rooms, each with a wood burning fireplace, wide plank timber floors, and exposed ceiling beams overhead.
A covered porch carries the rooms out toward the lawn, the working spine of the house from May to October.
What is on the walls
Two very large paintings built from broken crockery hang in the dining room, one worked in blue and yellow, the other a black tree spreading across a field of yellow. Plates smashed and set into heavy paint on panel is Julian Schnabel’s medium, and he has kept a studio at the eastern end of Long Island for decades.
The den off the porch holds two works by René Ricard, the poet and critic whose 1981 Artforum essay made Jean-Michel Basquiat’s name. One carries a joke about surfboard wax in his looping hand; the other is signed and dated 1989 in yellow. A Basquiat monograph sits on the table between them, which is either a coincidence or the point.
The rooms around the art
The furniture keeps the same company. A pair of Hans Wegner Papa Bear chairs face the den fireplace, a Warren Platner table for Knoll beside one of them. A Poul Henningsen pendant hangs on a long stem over the dining table, and a second Henningsen lamp sits on a shelf in the office. The library is furnished with Pierre Jeanneret’s Chandigarh armchairs, and the office continues in the same teak: a desk on compass legs, a three panel screen with oxblood inset panels.
The kitchen backsplash is not tile in the ordinary sense. It is a painted mural running across every square, figures and grapes and a satyr’s face carried from one tile to the next, under a hood that stops just short of it. In the primary bath a Drummonds basin stands on nickel legs beneath a pair of celadon glass sconces.
The two acres
The land does the resort work. A heated gunite pool sits in a slate terrace, with a cabana and a pergola shading the sitting area beside it; the tennis court was recently resurfaced. Mature gardens and the perimeter hedges screen all of it, so the grounds read as a sequence of green rooms rather than a lawn with equipment on it.
South of the highway puts the ocean beaches minutes down the road and Bridgehampton village a few minutes the other way, with Sagaponack next door.
In Contract
