Architectural Digest (September 1997)

“Thomas Britt” 

Myriad influences shape a fanciful guest pavilion on Long Island. 

            When I’m not working, my second love in life is traveling,” says New York-based Thomas Britt. But a few interior designers have integrated their travels as thoroughly- or as fantastically- into their work. During his prolific thirty-eight-year career, Britt’s inspiration has been literally all over the map, borrowing from places and eras as diverse as imperial Russia, Renaissance Italy, Napoleonic France and feudal India.

            His interiors draw on world architecture and history, translating exotic elements into a grand chimerical style without sacrificing Western comfort or sophistication. “I’m interested in creating classical proportions and dramatic statements,” Britt says, “not only in a graphic sense but in the juxtaposition of objects and patterns.

            “I’m always concerned with the big bang, the overall look,” he adds. “I conceptualize a project in its entirety before it’s begun, and the ideas usually come together in a single flash.”

            Britt’s estate in Water Mill, New York, has served as both a laboratory and a sanctuary for the peripatetic Kansas City-born designer; there, unimpeded by the pressure of having to please clients, he has been able to realize his fantasies. The compound compromises a cedar-shingled house, a pyramid-topped poolhouse and a flowing Moroccan tent (see Architectural Digest, August 1991) that he uses for entertaining. While Britt consciously strove to develop a compatible look for the exteriors, he has designed the interiors intuitively, occasionally reiterating themes but more often forging in dramatically new directions. His most recent addition to the grounds is a guesthouse, shaped broadly by his travels through Europe and Asia and specifically by traditions in Malta, Turkey, and India.

            Shingled in gray cedar shakes and painted with white trim, the guesthouse is composed of two octagonal structures, containing a living room and a bedroom, linked by a rectangular study and a narrow hall. It was built with the help of Southampton-based architect Peter Cook and sited to be on a direct axis with the pool to the north and an allee of cherry trees to the east. From the outside, it possesses the casual elegance of a contemporary New England summer cottage. This little deceit, however, is part of Britt’s larger game plan.

            Working with designer Valentino Samsonadze, Britt envisioned the guesthouse along the lines of an eighteenth-century pleasure pavilion in the chinoiserie style. He cites the pavilions at Chiswick in London and Peterhof in St. Petersburg and the teahouse at Sans Souci in Potsdam as among his favorites. “All of those buildings have a fantasy to them mixed with varying degrees of pure Oriental elements,” Britt says. “They’re interpretations of the Orient that in their own way are as intriguing as the real thing.”

            Like his own pavilion, the precedents Britt mentions are subdued on the outside. “The big surprise comes when you go inside and discover that you’ve been swept into a faraway land,” he explains. Indeed, visitors to Britt’s guesthouse are immediately struck by its allusions to Rajasthan, the northwestern Indian state celebrated for its extravagantly elaborate palaces and fortresses- and a regular destination for the designer over the past twenty-five years.

            In keeping with his customary style, the pavilion is a study in luxuriant color, which not only sets its dreamy tone but acts strategically to connect and differentiate the discrete spaces. The living room and bedroom are a deep peach, while the small study is bathed in hot pink; all three rooms are accented with burgundy draperies and upholstery fabrics. Turquoise hallways serve as a dramatic counterpoint.

            The inspiration for this palette comes from a building on Malta. “It was painted in the most remarkable shades of turquoise and mauve and sea blue and hot Indian pink,” Britt recalls. “Somehow they just stuck with me.”

            Britt appointed the pavilion principally with furniture from India and China, selecting an intricately worked set of Indian metal chairs as the focal point of the living room. Four nineteenth-century Chinese marble-topped tables with a palm motif, silver-leafed by Britt, blend in nicely, as does the steel sunburst chandelier by Alexander von Eikh. There are also glazed Fo dogs and fish (actually nineteenth-century Chinese roof ornaments) around the fireplace and four Indian lamps made from parchment, hand-painted in kaleidoscopic colors and traditional designs. Two sofas and a tufted ottoman in the center of the room “make it comfortable for us Westerners,” Britt says.

            In the bedroom and the study, Britt echoed several of the living room’s motifs, such as the silver-leafed furniture and burgundy upholstery fabrics and draperies. But the most impressive and unifying element is a series of nineteenth-century engravings painted with gouache that depict Indian men and women of different castes and orders. The designer hung more than a hundred of them in clusters throughout the pavilion.

            Britt framed the prints using mats of checkerboard mirrors to create a shimmering effect that gives the pavilion a truly exotic flavor. He says it is reminiscent of “some of the rooms I visited in Rajasthani fortresses” and of the “domed mirrored ceilings I saw at several palaces in Istanbul.”

            Although Britt’s guesthouse is far from his first foray into Oriental style, it is perhaps his most adventurous and cohesive. “The intimate scale was liberating, and I wasn’t preoccupied with my clients’ needs,” he says. “The pavilion is pure fantasy. I just let my imagination run wild.”

Text by Carol Lutfy. Photography by Jaime Ardiles-Arce.