Metropolitan Home Magazine (July-August 1996)

“Cool Calm & Collected” 

MET HOME OF THE MONTH – A new summerhouse in Bridgehampton, L.I., embodies the shingle-style vernacular of its neighbors- but with a modern twist.

The driveway to Susan, Michael and 13-year-old Jake Sokol’s front door cuts through a field of wildflowers. But Susan, browsing with garden shears, often passes them by. “They’re uncontrolled, and that’s their glory. But because the house is so disciplined, they don’t seem right inside,” she explains.

            Built by architect Peter Cook, with interiors by Mariette Himes Gomez, the house is a marriage of spare and sensual. It has dormers, but the absence of mullions makes them pristine. It has turn-of-the-century Hamptons graciousness, but no summerhouse clichés. (The means tailored upholstery, not slipcovers; more wool carpeting than casual coir.) Furnishings merely hint at the ocean: “We planted subtle references to green,” says Gomez, “in the McCoy pottery and celadon cushions. If you soften the edges, a room can be pared down and still homey.”

            Susan Sokol, former president of the Calvin Klein Women’s Collection and now a fashion-industry consultant, and her husband, Michael, who owns a textile company, wanted rooms whose bareness would create a sense of relief, not deprivation. “The only real color is framed by the windows. There’s so much to look at outside,” says Gomez, “that these white rooms never feel empty.”

            Although she cultivates white orchid for the rest of the house, Susan Sokol cuts less formal bouquets for the kitchen- a room with city simplicity and country bones. Tile colors never stray past monochromatic cream and gray, and cabinets wear a uniform (and barely there) finish: transparent white satin, veiled with sienna glaze for the merest implication of age. But the cupboards are varied in stature and silhouette. “Pieces farthest from the eating area are tall, with an elegant proportion,” says kitchen designer Joan Picone, who often works with Peter Cook, “while the cabinetry nearest the table is lower and smaller. It’s a gentle way of bringing the mood down. If everything were standard height, you would sit straight up in your chair.”

            Picone cut the countertops from dark green granite, an urbane reference to the nearby sea- then used friendly beadboard for paneling. “It creates texture, but not much contrast,” she says. By sheathing even the stainless-steel refrigerator in beadboard, she let the professional-sized cooktop rule the kitchen with its industrial strength gleam. (Storage drawers, rather than ovens, lie beneath the burners; the double ovens are embedded in the wall.)

            The butcher-block island’s architecture is Picone’s own homage to Cook: The table’s pillarlike legs pay subtle tribute to the bulging Victorian-inspired columns outside. “I wanted the kitchen to be architecturally sensitive to the rest of the house,” Picone says, “without going overboard.”

            A windowed tower, 18 feet high, opens the master bedroom to the sky. Beneath it, the walls begin sloping only six feet from the floor- establishing a more human scale. Similarly, when the architect gave the bedroom its glass wall, he carved it into friendly forms: French doors and recessed window seats. The room reads as pure white, but Gomez wove through it a few mahogany furnishings that register as ebony. “If the black and white seemed equal to your eye, the room would lose interest. But a white room must be anchored by something dark, or it floats away.” 

• What the Pros Know About White*
  Mariette Himes Gomez dipper her brush into many hues of white (all by Benjamin Moore). “If I painted everything from one can,” she says, “it would feel like a non-colored space.” Living-room walls are Brilliant White, a paint based on Greek revival houses. Dining-room walls are Monterey White, its biscuity undertones drawn out by Super White trim. Kitchen walls are White Dove, a light cream, under a Decorators White ceiling- the color of high-quality writing paper (barely tinged with gray). The master bedroom is entirely Super White, the lack of contrast implying that this dreamy room is not quite tethered to the house. “What makes a summer house?” muses Gomez. “Pale colors, a good amount of bare floor and a light and airy treatment at the windows.”

Details

            With no visual fuss, the house generates its own rhythms and patterns.

1.The architect, Peter Cook, striped the gabled ends with cream-colored battens, a detail that was inspired by a shingled church nearby (porch railings repeat the striations). Cook stained the shingles tobacco, not the area’s typical sun bleached gray, as it seemed more suitable to a house set back from the water.

2. The columns appear in threes at each façade of the house; their sumo-wrestler stature is adapted from the work of Victorian architect H. H. Richardson, who designed the first shingle-style house in 1874.

3. To celebrate the living room’s two-story expanse, Cook compressed the entry hall that leads into it, elevating the floor and lowering the ceiling. “You have a greater appreciation of a large room,” he explains, “if you enter it from a small one.”

4. White fabric panels combine architectural rigor with unexpected softness. Their swiveling brass rods are custom-made, but the treatment is easy to adapt: Pull sheer fabric taut between crane or elbow rods installed on the window frame.

5. To raise the dining room’s emotional temperature, Gomez bathed the walls in a faintly beige off-white. The webbing on the Alvar Aalto chairs reads as a plaid of texture rather than color; the table is a Gomez design.

6. In the master bedroom, Gomez chose wheat carpeting as a visual anchor for the room; above it, fabrics and paint, in pure white, reinforce the decorator’s own summerhouse ideal- “light and airy,” she explains, “but also stylish.”roduced by Linda O’Keefe and Sarah Downs Loewenberg. Photographs by Maura McEvoy. Written by Dylan Landis.