There are two sides to Long Island: the glamorous Hamptons, home to Gatsby’s notorious parties, and the quieter, more rural North Fork, a place of pine-covered sand dunes, forests, vineyards and barns. This is the spot one Brooklyn-based family picked to build a holiday home to spend time with friends. They turned to architecture studio Lake Flato to realise their vision.
Captivated by what he describes as the ‘heroic view over the glistening bay, with great sunsets and big skies’, the firm’s co-founder Ted Flato was pleased to learn that his clients wanted to leverage the beauty of the land and light. Their aim was to create a place friends would feel at ease and that could be enjoyed in all seasons.
Instinctively, Ted looked to the benefits of the utilitarian timber barns that dot the area. ‘Part of them is always inserted into the landscape to provide better insulation,’ he explains, ‘and they’re often black to absorb the heat of the sun.’ In the end, the project evolved to include three barns clustered in a camp-like compound around a farm courtyard.
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On the western edge there is a long living barn overlooking the bay, a studio (the client is a filmmaker) is anchored in the northern slope, and a small guest barn, converted from an old carriage house, completes the southern side.
None of it, though, was built in situ. Ted and his colleague Kelly Weckman approached a New Hampshire firm that specialises in prefabricated wooden structures and devised an outlandish plan: build the house offsite, then transport it by boat. ‘We looked at the map and thought romantically of the idea that it is Fitzcarraldo [Werner Herzog’s epic about a man who moves a ship over a mountain]!’ laughs Ted.
The beauty of prefab is it can be quickly built in a controlled environment – there’s little waste and it’s easier to achieve a greater level of precision. Everything was put on a ferry in Connecticut and brought over to Orient Point at the tail end of the North Fork. In just a few weeks, 50 percent of this home was already standing.
Another benefit was that, unlike a traditional barn that has huge trusses running through it, a stiff wooden frame allows for large internal open-plan volumes. ‘From the outside, this house looks like a humble, anonymous barn,’says Ted, ‘but inside it’s a clean, contemporary experience of just roof planes, wall planes and columns.’
The contrast between the black exterior and the bright interiors is striking, with dark ebonised oak elements like the kitchen seemingly floating in the airy, whitewashed pine shell.
‘They wanted it relaxing and Zen-like but to have a modern, crisp feel,’ says Ted of the interior design. ‘It’s a play of finishes and simplicity,’ he adds, with the furniture an eclectic mix that includes the owners’ large collection of modern Danish pieces. Outside, the final piece in the puzzle was Margie Ruddick’s landscaping – layered grasses that create a wild meadow, rolling right up to the house.
The team has kept in touch with the family, and Ted has often been back to pay this home a visit. ‘You’ll be having a cup of coffee and the light bouncing off the bay is coming right into the room, while in the winter suddenly it’s all white outside and there’s this whole other feeling,’ he says, adding that Kelly loves the porch, which, with its 270-degree views of the bay and marina, feels like the prow of a boat.
It feels fitting that a house that travelled by barge is like a ship itself. Perfectly in tune with the land it’s anchored in, it’s a safe port for the family who call it home. lakeflato.com
