It didn’t take long for architects and architecture buffs to hear that something extraordinary had gone up on Spaeth Lane in East Hampton, and before they knew it Ellin and Renny Saltzman were coping every weekend with small armies of wide-eyed trespassers.

    “Renny would stand there with a BB gun and shoot at them,” Ms. Saltzman said on a recent Sunday when the late September sun was playing shadow games with the planes and curves of the house’s dazzling white exterior. “I didn’t know then that it was an icon.”

    The year was 1969. The couple, with a young son and an infant daughter, had barely settled in before the icon, one of Richard Meier’s first modernist houses, was featured in that year’s Christmas issue of House and Garden magazine.

    Photos of the house usually home in on the south face, where a footbridge connects two complementary structures: the main building, with softly rounded contours and an enormous single-paned window, and the guest house, a spare rectangle atop a cubistic support. The sharply angled north facade, in contrast, is inscrutable, bare of anything but two narrow windows, a startling contrast to the light-filled south face with its projecting terraces and receding cavities. “I do love the outside of this house,” Ms. Saltzman said.

    The Saltzmans had rented in East Hampton for several summers before they decided to build their own place. “One summer, Memorial Day to Labor Day, we were on Buell Lane in an old Mulford house,” said Ms. Saltzman, “and they were going to raise the rent from $1,800 to $2,400. Renny said that was too much; it was time to look for a house.”

    Almost all the land on either side of Two Mile Hollow Beach from Further Lane to the Atlantic was planted with potatoes at the time, owned by a man who, as it happened, knew the Saltzmans. He drove them to the site.

     Ms. Saltzman recalled the scene: “ ‘Stand on top of the car,’ he said, and we did — and there was the ocean.”

    They bought three acres and started looking for an architect. “Renny said, ‘Why don’t you buy a shelter magazine?’ I didn’t even know what that was. I just knew I wanted white.”

    The magazine she picked up had a spread on a sculptural white house in New Jersey, built by a young unknown. It caught her eye. A few days later, talking with a friend, Anita Hoffman, Ms. Saltzman told her, “I think I’ve found our architect. Richard Meier.”

    “Meier?” Ms. Hoffman responded in surprise. “We’ve just hired him!” (The David and Anita Hoffman house, on Georgica Road in East Hampton, was completed about a year before work started on the Saltzman house.)

    The Saltzmans were a high-octane couple-about-Manhattan — he a prominent interior designer, she a fashion consultant, later the senior vice president and corporate fashion director of Saks Fifth Avenue. They wanted plenty of space to entertain but also a rural refuge. And, of course, that ocean view. The house opens up like a parachute as you climb to the third floor, where a sun deck looks out on a vast lawn with a distant pool and the sea beyond.

    Mr. Meier designed the loft-like top floor to be a guest bedroom, but he gave it neither a bathroom nor a closet, “being single,” Ms. Saltzman said, smiling. No one has ever slept there because the Saltzmans did not put in a bed. “When we were guests at other houses, we never wanted to be on top of anyone, and Renny never wanted people on top of us,” she said. The room became a rainy-day play space for children and grandchildren instead, while guests enjoy faraway privacy at the other end of the footbridge.

    The giant window in the living room, running the entire height of the house, makes the room, like the house itself, seem far larger than it is. At only 3,200 square feet, the house is human-size in comparison to today’s megaliths and not in the least overwhelming. “I can stay alone, but can still have 14 for dinner,” Ms. Saltzman said.

    The hearth is the focus of the room: a freestanding white rectangle enclosing a black fireplace, with a double-height black cylinder above that hides the chimney flue. Five hollow steel columns, also painted ice-white, hold up the ceiling. The house has no basement, but plenty of built-in storage space.

    The living room’s comfortable banquettes were Mr. Saltzman’s inspiration. “I panicked a little about how to furnish around the columns in the living room when I saw them going up,” he told Architectural Digest in 1996. “I couldn’t do a traditional seating plan with two sofas facing each other, or four chairs in a circle. I realized that a wraparound banquette with floating chairs was the solution.”

    “It was a combination of Renny’s design talent and Richard’s architectural talent,” Ms. Saltzman said.”

    He covered the banquettes in leopard-skin-striped  velvet, much to Mr. Meier’s dismay. “Our children could hardly sit on a white sofa and eat strawberries,” Mr. Saltzman explained to the magazine. “I was revolting against his clean lines.”

    The two men disagreed fiercely, too, over Mr. Saltzman’s choice of bright contemporary prints in the bedrooms, a zebra-skin rug on a bathroom floor, and most of all, red Formica counters in the kitchen. “Richard HATED the red kitchen,” Ms. Saltzman said. A red-and-black model Rolls-Royce, tiny license plate RBS, sits on a shelf over the kitchen sink, a gift from Ms. to Mr. “Renny always wanted a Rolls-Royce,” she said.

    So much sunlight floods the interior of the house that artwork cannot be hung on the walls. It would fade, just as the leopard print faded over the years. Instead, Mr. Saltzman used African sculpture and headdresses.

    For the south-facing dining room on the ground floor, dominated by an African antelope headdress, he designed a white elliptical table seating 10 or 12. “Renny loved to entertain. He gave the big dinner parties,” Ms. Saltzman said. “He organized the meals, I did the seating plan.”

    What was once a child’s bedroom is now a den, with a wall displaying Mr. Saltzman’s collection of African masks and old tractor seats. “He loved the way the tractor seats and masks worked together,” Ms. Saltzman said. “They both have faces.” The children’s rooms are small and functional, built at a time when not many bedrooms had their own bathrooms.

    Today, the velvet leopard stripes and contemporary prints are pretty much gone, replaced by neutral beiges and natural materials: wool, cotton, linen, silk. Almost everything else is unchanged, though, including the zebra rug, now under a game table behind the fireplace, and the red kitchen counters that Mr. Saltzman, who died in 2000, so loved. The flowers and shrubs that used to border the expansive grounds have vanished, however, consumed by hungry herds. Ms. Saltzman suspects hers may be the only house on the street without deer fencing.

    Over the decades, the fame of Richard Meier’s Saltzman House has spread worldwide. It is regarded today as a landmark of austere white modernism. A young Chinese architecture student named Yii Fan built a maquette of the house and wrote about it recently on his Web page:

    “This is what I have just finished. A model of the Saltzman House. It cost about three weeks and some model material less than 100 Yuan. . . . Not bad, isn’t it? I did it very carefully and I love it. Through this assignment, I have a deeper cognition of the ideas of Richard Meier. And I could even imagine that how he deal with such a big roomage. The style of pithiness conquered me once again.”

The south facade, where a narrow footbridge connects the rounded main house with the rectangular guest house.

Durell Godfrey

Ms. Saltzman, who was a top fashion executive, knows just “where;” an African sculpture dominates the dining room

Durell Godfrey

An exterior spiral staircase

Durell Godfrey

Tractor seats and African masks in the den

Durell Godfrey

Looking out from a recessed terrace to the pool and poolhouse.

Durell Godfrey

Stairs lead up from the entrance and down to the kitchen;a model Rolls Royce stood in for the real thing.

Durell Godfrey

Ellin Saltzman on the third-floor sun deck.

Durell Godfrey

Durell Godfrey

Durell Godfrey

   Anyone who has driven down one of the bucolic lanes in Sagaponack can see it. A virtual explosion of plywood, concrete, balled trees, dumpsters, and piles of soil off to the side of properties, lying in wait for final grading. The roads are streaked with dirt, and the sounds of construction boom across the fields.

    The size, scale, and quantity of residential building sites are mind-blowing, even for an architect, who can, at least at times, revel in such creativity. Having a modest project in Sagaponack has led me to Town Line Road and Daniel’s Lane, where there is a palpable feeling of power, energy, and the mighty force of those who, despite the economic meltdown, landed at the top of the heap.

    Wall Street and hedge fund titans and real estate speculators have set their sights on Sagg. Its peaceful vistas, dotted with houses in the historic farm vernacular, are now sprinkled with strawberry-pink Corian above-ground pools, Middle Eastern follies, and imported stone edifices. Change has provided steady work for a vast number of tradespeople, architects, designers, landscape architects, engineers, and any possible specialty construction/design  service available. 

    The Sagaponack Village Building Department and Zoning Board see some of the most extraordinary manifestations in architecture today. It is fascinating to watch those involved gracefully try to balance the heritage of the village and the right to freedom of expression.

     The signage is so rampant (full disclosure: I have one up as well) that a sign law (perhaps slightly less stringent than East Hampton Village’s) must be on the horizon. In the words of Lady Bird Johnson, “Public feeling is going to bring about regulation so you don’t have a solid diet of billboards on all the roads.”

    Months ago, I listened to a description of plans for light posts at the end of a long driveway, at the end of a private street. The posts, as presented, were large enough to fit a person inside them. I couldn’t help but wonder if the homeowners were going to station guards there.

    The East End, for an architect, is a series of never-ending fascinations of architectural philosophy — and psychology.

    Erica Broberg Smith is a practicing architect in East Hampton. She also likes taking photos.

    When Mary Jane and Charles Brock, who had spent 25 years as the owners of a comfortable East Hampton Village house at the corner of Buell Lane, went looking for something where they and their two adult children could spread out and do their own thing, they didn’t envision another Main Street residence.

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    But friends directed their attention to the 1799 Gen. Jeremiah Miller house, an expansive gambrel-roofed house surrounded by brickwork, boxwood hedges, a verandah, croquet court, and putting green, and it “spoke to me,” Ms. Brock said. “The South-ern-ness of the house and its history — you feel that.” Ms. Brock has Southern roots.

“It’s a great entertaining house,” she said, while ushering a visitor through its richly appointed rooms on a rainy summer day.

    When the Brocks bought the 12,500-square-foot, eight-bedroom, seven-bath house in 2005, it had been renovated and restored by different owners over the years, but its historical integrity had been maintained.

    Ms. Brock said the house was in remarkably solid shape. General Miller had been the village postmaster and the front parlor was his office, so it wasn’t a surprise that the style had been “very Americana.” Now, after top to bottom redecorating, she describes the house as “gracious and elegant, but relaxed.”

    Its wide-plank pine floors are a counterpoint to detailed finishes, tile work, and the carved or stone mantels on the house’s nine working fireplaces. On the main floor, one fireplace has a seaweed-and-shells theme; another a pineapple motif.

    “There’s a harmony. The house is an extraordinarily rich architectural environment,” Ms. Brock said, as she pointed out pewter hardware throughout the house, a pocket door, and Venetian glass finials on the newel posts of an exquisite, three-story, floating stairway, which dates to the 1880s.

    A fireplace in the center hall is a welcoming feature, Ms. Brock said, for visitors during events such as the East Hampton Historical Society’s Thanksgiving house tour or benefits for the Big Apple Circus, of which she is a vice chairwoman and director. Parties for Guild Hall and the Hamptons International Film Festival have also been held at the house.

     In 1885, when the Edward De Rose family of New York bought the house as a summer residence, they had it moved 150 feet back from Main Street. Now, a flower border and a row of pear trees flank the boxwood hedge obscuring the sidewalk and the trunks of tall street-side trees. The De Roses remodeled the house, but, an article in The East Hampton Star noted at the time, preserved its character.

    The historic front door had opened right from Main Street into two separate parlors. They are now combined as a game and media room, which is filled with whimsy. A pool table inherited from former owners, pillows with a monkey print, and a jungle mural on wood “sort of sets the tone for vibrant color” in the room, Ms. Brock said.

There is art throughout the house, including many works by local artists. “This is a big home, and we enjoyed finding pieces we loved,” Ms. Brock said. They include several photos and paintings of the Deep South, a work by the Springs artist Ralph Carpentier, and a three-dimensional wall sculpture of bicycle racers, which was purchased in Paris. “It’s just so exuberant,” Ms. Brock said.

    A formal room contains an antique piano from Austria, which can be set to play by itself. Nearby, overlooking a section of the patio that Ms. Brock, in Southern style, calls a verandah, is an open dining area where numerous tables are set up when the Brocks host a lunch party. Outside, two acres of grounds that include a hidden shade garden are tended by the Galen Williams landscaping crew.

    A conservatory, off the family’s less formal dining room and kitchen, has a light blue motif, with seersucker fabrics. The kitchen, Ms. Brock said, “is a country kitchen, but it’s an elegant country kitchen.”

    The second and third floors of the house contain separate suites for each member of the family. One master bedroom has “more of a study effect,” she said, with ironwork bookshelves made by Mark Poplowski, an artisan who works for the family as a handyman. He also made the bases of two tables in the formal dining room and designed a fireplace tool that indicates whether a damper is open or closed.

    Another master bedroom has a blue marble fireplace, and a bath with paint the color of the sky and tiles designed with flowers and leaves. An exercise room and sauna adjoin it.

    The Brock offspring have custom-decorated their own rooms. Their daughter, Susanna Brock, Ms. Brock said, has made hers “über feminine. It is to me the sweet spot in the house. It’s just calm.” A little study has trundle beds covered in grayish blues and taupes, and a painting by Casey Anderson of a field of flowers. A nearby sitting room has couches and a table under a triangle window with diamond-shaped panes, and a guest room has a giraffe theme, from a water color to a pillow to a couple of wood sculptures to a sign that says “Giraffe Crossing.”  Ms. Brock explained that a giraffe had been the opening act of a circus she and her daughter once went to in Geneva.

    Walker Brock and his wife, who has a master’s degree in historic preservation, are restoring houses in Charleston. The recently married couple have peppered their suite with antique objects and art: propellers, a ladder, a window frame — items Ms. Brock called “weathered, soft, early Americana.”

    Another guest bedroom has light wood paneling, rattan furniture, and grass-textured wallpaper. Reflecting a view of the pool from the windows in Walker’s bedroom are four paintings of water done by another Springs artist, Randall Rosenthal, in 1983 and purchased at a Guild Hall Clothesline art sale.  

    Ms. Brock’s Big Apple Circus affiliation is manifested in lively touches throughout the house, including a painting in the kitchen of an apple by James Del Grosso and a sculpture of a circus acrobat in the conservatory.

“I want the house to be warm and welcoming,” Ms. Brock said with characteristic modesty. It’s an achievement that cannot be denied.

   It’s difficult to focus on next spring’s garden before Labor Day has even come and gone.  However, it is already too late to order fall-blooming crocuses and colchicums, and the deadline for ordering spring bulbs is fast approaching.

    The pleasure you’ll have next February, March, and April is well worth the hour or so spent now looking through catalogs or Web sites of bulb dealers and sending in an order.  My three favorites are Odyssey Bulbs for treasures (especially corydalis), Old House Gardens for heirloom bulbs, and Brent and Becky’s Bulbs for the rest.

    Daffodils and tulips always head the list, but after spending the last two Aprils botanizing for bulbs in Greece and Turkey, it is crocuses and the so-called minor bulbs — anemones, corydalis, scilla, snowdrops, grape hyacinths, and the like — that are commanding my attention this year.

    Memories of a valley in the northern Peloponnesus carpeted with dazzling golden adonis begs to be recreated.  Snowdrops growing out of crevices and on ledges in the Taurus Mountains in Turkey were astonishing, as much for their location in an inhospitable habitat as for my determination to scale the steep, gravelly slopes intent on getting up close.

    Much easier to recreate in sandy woodlands on the South Fork is the jumble of winter aconites, scilla, snowdrops, and lavender Crocus biflorus growing out of oak litter in the snow melt of the Turkish mountains.  Mix the bulbs together, dribble over your allotted space, and plant where they land, just as in nature. 

    Those fortunate enough to have heavier soil ought to try cyclamen, lots and lots of them around the base of trees and shrubs with heavy root competition, and on a slope if possible. Almost every wooded area in Greece and Turkey is carpeted with cyclamen in deep rose that almost take your breath away. In Greece we saw C. repandum and C. hederifolium, and in Turkey, C. alpinum and C. cilicium, all of which are hardy here. With careful selection you can have flowers and patterned foliage in every season.

    In sunnier areas, the Grecian windflowers (although they are in Turkey, too), Anemone blanda, grow in colors and forms we can hardly dream of: singles, doubles, shades of blue and purple, pinks, and white. They like moisture in early spring, flowering just as the snow recedes, but a good baking in dry soil in summer. Often we found them growing in small patches of a foot or so across, but many of them and in different colors. In another place they nearly carpeted an entire valley floor, interspersed with crocuses and scilla.

    Corydalis solida and other bulbous corydalis species abound in the Taurus Mountains. These are among the earliest flowers to bloom in my garden and flourish in East Hampton, unlike the herbaceous blue corydalis from China that gives up before the heat and humidity really get going. They are in a range of pinks, lavender, white, and the more orangey hues. Strangely we saw almost no cross-pollination. When I began planting my woodland garden, I bought a few bulbs in different colors and let nature do its thing; the result is a multicolored tapestry that covers the ground.

    Of the larger bulbs, crocuses are among the earliest to flower, sometimes poking through the snow. If you were to see the graceful crocuses in Turkey and Greece, you’d never look at another large Dutch hybrid again.

    Most of the Turkish crocuses were C. biflorus in shades of blue or lavender and C. chrysanthus in yellow, gold, an occasional white, and natural hybrids of the two, some yellow on the inside and bronze on the outside. Selections like Snow Bunting, Cream Beauty, and Blue Pearl were collected a hundred years ago, brought to Holland and have been popular ever since. At altitude on Mount Parnassos and the Chelmos Mountains of the Peleponnesus, C. sieberi, purple with a yellow throat, is king.

    We tend to mass the small crocuses in compact groups, but in nature they are scattered here and there or in loose swathes. It is worth stopping at Breadzilla in Wainscott next winter where the crocus plantings mimic the Turkish mountainsides.

    One of the first bulbs I ever planted was Fritillaria persica. It has spikes of nodding bells in a sort of mourning purple. It was as odd as anticipated, flowered its first year and never returned. Now I know why: We found vigorous clumps growing in full sun in rocky sites with very lean soil.

    Of course you don’t have to ford a wide and stony stream in your bare feet to see a fritillaria new to science, or climb a steep slope covered with boulders and loose gravel in search of a rare scilla, only to later discover a large group of them nearly at eye level by the road. But what fun it was to travel by tractor to reach the snow fields in Emily Valley for one last gorge of the full range of Turkish bulbs.

    Having botanized for bulbs makes my ordering of next year’s supply and anticipating next spring’s display a replay of glorious vistas and flowers.

    Where to next? The mountains of Crete, renowned for crocuses, col­chicums, and sternbergia that flower in November.

Abby Jane Brody is seen in April in the Taurus Mountains of Turkey at an elevation of 6,000 feet during a botanizing pilgrimage that also took her to Greece. From left, she photographed crocus up close, a jumble of snowdrops, scilla, and crocus in the Taurus Mountains, and Tulipa australis on Mount Parnassos, in addition to hundreds of other photos. Her next destination? Crete.

   It sits on a 100-foot-wide sliver of oceanfront dunes in Montauk-on-Sea, a small subdivision laid out years ago on Napeague. Called Shore House, it is the dream beach house of Glenn Pushelberg and George Yabu, partners in a doubly eponymous firm known internationally for restaurant and retail design, which is based in New York and Toronto.

    “We were looking for a house in the Hamptons,” Mr. Pushelberg told a visitor recently, standing on the 548-square-foot second-floor deck, which wraps around from the ocean side to the east side of the house.

    “We wanted something magical, something close to the beach. I saw a flier in The Sunday Times. I said, ‘George, look at this.’ It was a plastic shingle house by the ocean. We came out, and the agent tried to show us the house. We weren’t interested in the house at all.”

    With something else in mind, Mr. Pushelberg said, “We’ll buy it.” It was the oceanfront property they wanted. The surrounding development pleased them as well.

    “We like this community,” Mr. Pushelberg said. “It’s real, earthier. It is not silly. There are real people here. They’re good neighbors.”

    They also liked the proximity of local shops that cater to designers and decorators, with an eclectic mix of antiques and primitive and modern furnishings, he said, mentioning Nellie’s of Amagansett. Thus began a five-year journey.    

    From the beginning the process was an intense collaboration between client and architect. The footprint of the house, the area on which construction was allowed, was small, and the result is a two-story, 2,950-square-foot house that blends into the dunes.

    The idea of variations in natural light led the Stelle Architects team headed by Viola Rouhani to give the house a horizontal exterior skeleton of slatted cedar panels. Some are fixed in place, and some are movable.

    The main living area is on the upper floor. It contains a large room that runs the width of the house from east to west, a master bedroom and bath, a powder room, and a kitchen.

    The large living room’s oceanfront wall disappears when three separate panels — glass, screen, and cedar — are slid away. There are no structural pillars or columns to obstruct the view, save for a fireplace and chimney on the eastern wall. The panels stack up behind a free-standing support column next to the kitchen.

    In the original design, the master bedroom faced the ocean, with the living area running north to south. In a moment of inspiration, Ms. Rouhani said, Mr. Pushelberg and Mr. Yabu suggested rotating the house 90 degrees, positioning the master bedroom on the roadside corner and allowing the main room to have the full dune and ocean view. The bedroom also has sliding panels that open to the wraparound deck.

    “We did the shell of the building,” said Ms. Rouhani. “Everything inside that you see is their design.”

    The oak flooring of the living room is flush with the sliding panels’ sills, as is the deck, which is constructed of a Brazilian hardwood called ipe. If you walk barefoot onto the deck toward the ocean, it is almost as if you are walking on smooth sand.

    “They designed the fireplace; we integrated the fireplace,” Ms. Rouhani said. When the panels are all open, the fireplace seems to float in the air.

    The kitchen elements, chosen by the partners, are for the most part high tech. Some of the drawers under the long kitchen island are refrigerated and others, below the refrigerated units, are designed for food storage. Dishes are stored in four sliding drawers next to the sink that are integral to the dishwasher, which is from Fisher and Payke Appliances. Additional cabinets are up on the western wall, and they open automatically at the touch of a hand.

    The house is also energy self-sufficient, with solar panels on the roof. When possible, energy can be returned to the power grid. The roof is flat and there is a hot tub on it, as well.

    The ground floor has three guestrooms and a media room. One of the guest rooms has been outfitted with bunk beds, with their own lockers and guest bathrobes.

    At ground level, boxed in by fixed cedar panels, is a barbecue area with a tropical feel, open to the air. A dumbwaiter connects it to the kitchen.

    A broad cedar staircase inside a similar slatted enclosure turns in a square “U” from the ground level to the second floor and up to the roof. Technically, it is an exterior staircase because it is open to the elements, but it is the only connection, besides the dumbwaiter, between the floors.

    Because the East Hampton Town Code mandates that single-family residences have only interior staircases between floors, the partners have gone to the zoning board of appeals for a variance. It is pending.

    The downstairs opens out to a “V” in the dunes, with a mahogany walkway leading to the beach. Chris LaGuardia designed the landscaping, using indigenous grasses and pines, which have been planted over the last year to preserve the dunes.

    “I am against light pollution,” Mr. Yabu said. “No landscape lighting on the dunes and beyond. It harkens back to my days as a kid. Seeing a sky that was dark, and you actually see the stars. We appreciate that.” 

    Inside, the feel of moving from space to space through the air that flows in when the walls are open was a vision of the architectural team. The result is a magical beach house, seemingly woven into the sand itself.

Horizontal cedar slats on the second story of the 2,950-square-foot house bring variations of natural light indoors. The panels along the large living room disappear to provide a column-less view.

The stairs that connect the two floors are open to the air and enclosed in fixed cedar panels. The toilets in the guest bedrooms are by Philippe Stark. Some are self-flushing.Like the stairs, a gathering and barbecue area is nominally outdoors.

Automated kitchen cabinets open with a touch of the hand. Drawers below the kitchen sink not only store dishes but wash them.Bunks beds are a playful feature of one of the downstairs guest rooms. Seating in the media room can be adjusted for any social gathering.The glass, screen, and slatted cedar exterior panels can be folded away.

Photos by Durell Godfrey

    ‘I think of it sort of as a modern barn,” John Berg said of the house on Old Stone Highway in Springs where he lives with his wife, Jennifer Desmond, and their 2-year-old son, Jules. Clad in cedar, with a metal roof, it has a full wall of glass doors in front and back that fold completely out of the way to let the breeze pass through.

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When Mr. Berg, an architect, designed the house, he turned for inspiration to a century-old barn a few miles away. He had spent six summers there, living in yurts and “painting and making movies” with friends. The land, owned by Mary Bayes Ryan, an artist, is the former site of Fireplace Lodge, a girls camp at the end of Springs Fireplace Road.

“There was a barn on the property that was this big communal space. It had a center aisle and sliding doors on either end. It’s a wonderful, very tall, open space with a hayloft. Under the hayloft there were more intimate spaces,” Mr. Berg said. He wanted a house with that same feel.

He and Ms. Desmond met in 2004 at Burning Man, an annual gathering of thousands in a Nevada desert, who camp, entertain one another, and create art installations.

“His best friend was camping with one of my best friends,” Ms. Desmond said. “I knew within 20 minutes of meeting him that I was going to be with him.” She was living in San Francisco, he was in New York, and they dated long distance for six months before she moved east to be with him. “It was pretty shortly after that. that we starting building this house,” she said. “I looked at it as symbolic of starting our life together.”

Mr. Berg had been searching for land in Springs for quite some time. When he got a call about the lot on Old Stone Highway, he looked it up on Google Earth. Within 15 minutes his mind was made up, Ms. Desmond said. “He bought the property sight unseen.”

Part of the reason he leapt at it was its size. At just over an acre and vacant except for a small, decrepit farmhouse near the road, which he didn’t think could be salvaged, it was unusual for Springs: narrow at the road, but 600 feet deep. Its long, lean shape — it’s just 87 feet wide — was a determining factor in his design.

Mr. Berg created a strand of spaces, set in a jagged line. First, one comes upon a detached garage, then a one-story children’s or guest bedroom section connected by a hallway to the main living area, which includes a high-ceilinged living and dining area, open to the kitchen. A loft-like second-floor master suite is above the kitchen. It includes an office space and sitting room, where a door leads out to a private roof deck.

The folding doors on the front and back of the living space, all with windows above them, make a part of the house “transparent,” Mr. Berg said, and give a sense that the backyard and the front are connected. Outside the kitchen doors is a covered outdoor eating area and beyond that a pool and Jacuzzi. The aspect of the design that pleases Mr. Berg most is “the experience of interlocking spaces between inside and out.”

“The layout of the house, the whole relationship of the kitchen to the living area, Jenny had tremendous influence on that,” Mr. Berg said.

“I was very insistent that the kitchen had to be the nucleus of the home, and I wanted a garden close by,” Ms. Desmond said. On one side of the house, she has a gated garden filled with flowers, lettuces, and herbs.

An old upright piano is in a corner of the living room. “It’s traveled with me wherever I’ve lived,” Ms. Desmond said. When her husband changed the design to carve out space for the piano “it was sort of a turning point in our relationship,” she said with a smile.

“Before I met John I was not a modernist,” she said. “Part of that is I didn’t realize how wonderful living in a modern space could feel. It’s incredibly freeing. . . . Now, I’ve become more of a brutal modernist than he is.”

The 2,200-square-foot house is modern, but warm. There is artwork in every room, most of it given to them by friends.

“Traditionalists like it, and they can’t figure out why,” Mr. Berg said. “That tension really makes it interesting.”

While aesthetics informed Mr. Berg’s design, energy efficiency played an important role, too. “We built the house to be as environmentally friendly as we could,” Ms. Desmond said.

The house is constructed of three basic materials: cedar, which is a highly renewable wood and is used inside and out, basic concrete block, which sells for “$1.50 off the shelf,” and the metal roof, which is gray. In time, all will weather to a similar tone and blend with the natural surroundings.

“We experimented with a bunch of fairly simple but important green building techniques,” Mr. Berg said. The walls and ceiling are structural insulated panels, commonly called SIPs panels, which are airtight. They were made in Vermont based on Mr. Berg’s blueprints. With panelized construction, houses come together quite quickly once the initial site work is done. “I think the neighbors were really freaked out and horrified,” Mr. Berg said, when the panels first arrived by truck.

In researching them, Mr. Berg found his way to Bill Chaleff, an East Hampton architect. “He was unbelievably generous with his knowledge and his time.” Mr. Chaleff, who was designing “green” houses long before the rest of the world seemed to catch on to their benefits, recommended Peter Germano of Water Mill as the builder. “He’s a real problem-solver,” Mr. Berg said. “He was a saving grace, because it’s an odd house.”

The floors are polished concrete with radiant geothermal heat, and the house is positioned for passive solar and, someday, solar panels on the roof. With all the windows and doors that open to maximize even the slightest breeze, air-conditioning is needed on only the hottest days.  

“We made ourselves sort of guinea pigs,” Mr. Berg said. Being new to the South Fork as an architect, he wanted the house to be “a billboard for what I’d like to do for people,” he said. Designing your own house and then living in it day in and day out, Mr. Berg said, “you learn a lot from your mistakes and you learn a lot from your successes. There are certain things I’d do differently and others I wouldn’t change at all. It has influenced all the other residential projects I’ve worked on out here.”

Mr. Berg, who has had his own firm, Bergdesign Architecture, since 2001, now has a home office in Springs in addition to his small office in New York, where the couple still live part time in a one-bedroom apartment in the West Village. By contrast, their house in Springs feels huge.

   Shades of coral, spring green, magenta, and the ever popular blue are some of the signature hues of this year’s Hampton Designer Showhouse in Water Mill.

    With a mix of textures, finishes, materials, wall treatments, and floor coverings, there is much to assimilate. Several familiar South Fork names are represented this year, including the Mark Humphrey Gallery, English Country Antiques, Lucille Khornak Photography, Old Town Crossing, and Mabley Handler Interior Design, which is based in Water Mill and makes liberal use of the fabric designs of Jonathan Adler, who lives on Shelter Island.

    Other participating designers, many of whom come from all over the country, mix the Hamptons aesthetic with touches of Palm Beach, Palm Springs, and even the Arctic.

    The $30 entry fee benefits Southampton Hospital. The showhouse, at 80 Flying Point Road, is open seven days a week, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., through Sept. 3. Mario Buatta is the honorary chairman of this year’s event; Jamie Drake and Alexa Hampton are honorary design co-chairmen.

    Fairies, imps, little folk, leprechauns — all the ministrants seen and unseen we will now discuss are not just at the bottom of a fine garden but at its middle and top; indeed, they are all through the plot. They are the makings of a good garden as much as expertise in general and fine compost in particular. They are enormously, energetically busy, as busy as the atom and, of course, equally invisible. It is not necessary to see something to believe in it. Think of odors. Think of music. Think of greed. Think then of fairies and you will not find it odd to believe in them.

    It is they that heal the interrupted, spaded-up earth with green, year after year. It is they that open buds, send aromas through the air, give those final touches to a composition to make it memorable. Stone without them would have no alleviating patina of moss or lichen and, as for this annealing, aging process, any bit of hardscaping, be it birdbath, fountain, or watering can, would remain quite offensively new, and forever parvenu.

    One can count on fairies to each morning create jeweled harmonies of dew on spider webs. They darken the eyes of frogs so deeply that they are obsidian pools, their bodies wet and all shades of emerald and jade. Fairies are always skating on the surface of still pools. When not, they make sweet partings in the grass as they stroll and cause porch rockers to tittup gently back and forth, breeze or no breeze. The ears of your cat prick in sleep and your dog may growl when they are passing by. And you will feel a coolness from nowhere on your arms or neck.

    Fairies are the mighty forces of invention that give your gate its remarkable individual screech and make utterly familiar and beckoning the sound of your screen door. If the shutting of the screen door brings back your pet, haven’t the fairies done it for you? I find their assistance enormously helpful in finding lost tools as well as pets, for they give me unerring inklings of where they might be. If they wish, they will keep ants away from picnics and bees as well, but only if they are in a large wood. They are impossible to prorate and are insulted if you call them, and in a tantrum if you leave out bowls of cream. They do seem to have favorite spots in the woods (always clearings) and certain sorts of people (and you just might be one), but as for gardens and gardeners, alas no, here one day, gone the next and, just when one feels utterly abandoned, back again, busy as always.

    I find that they are most prevalent in spring and in autumn, but you may have had different experiences.

    Postscript: The author in no way wishes to out fairies. He merely reports the rapport he has had with them since earliest childhood.

    Make your garden fairy-friendly. Believe and they will come.

   Centuries ago there was tulipomania. More recently and on a larger stage, there was the dot-com bubble, followed by the housing bubble. We know what happened to them.

    Gardeners now seem caught up in a hydrangea frenzy. There are mopheads, lacecaps, and Annabelle types, not to mention oakleaf and Japanese panicle hydrangeas. For the truly smitten, there are Japanese mountain hydrangeas (serrata), villosas, and other more tender species and varieties.

Hydrangeas, from left, are the new cultivar Incrediball in mid-June and in late July; a double-flowered lace cap, and Hayes Starburst, a double-flowered PeeGee.

    I’m as besotted as anyone. A quick tally of my garden came up with 15 varieties, some in multiples, plus three different climbers. How did it happen, and will it all come crashing down?

    The how is easy. Hydrangeas are traditional seaside shrubs, providing a splash of color in the middle of summer. They have always been popular on eastern Long Island, especially the blue mophead, H. macrophylla Nikko Blue. That’s the one that if you prune it too late, there are no flowers the following year. Conscientious landscapers take hedge shears in hand immediately after Labor Day in a decapitation ritual.

    Two white hydrangeas are also longtime mainstays here: the native H. arborescens Annabelle and the Japanese H. paniculata, both PeeGee (short for paniculata Grandiflora) and Tardiva.

    During the past 25 years the number of cultivars entering the market has grown dramatically and seems to be gathering even more momentum. Some trends: repeat blooming bushes that flower on both old and new wood for extended blooming, more compact bushes that do not require radical pruning, double flowers, a wider range of colors, and, of course, improvements, like an Annabelle that doesn’t flop.

    Can we work our way through an overabundance of choices? Ideal would be regional public gardens creating collections and conducting trials, like the EarthKind rose trials at the New York Botanical Garden, to evaluate and compare the many new cultivars against traditional gold standards. Trade associations often finance rose trials; if only hydrangea growers would do the same.

    Looking at container-grown flowering bushes at garden centers is an unreliable way to select plants. Last week, checking out the nurseries in this area, I saw too many varieties that I believe were misidentified. Also the soil used in container-grown shrubs tends to color the flowers pink; after a year or so in the ground, they are most likely to be blue, the prevailing color in our acid soils. However, minus aluminum in the soil the flowers will be shades of pink (add aluminum sulfate to the soil in that case, if you wish).

    Reference books (especially “Hydrangeas for American Gardens” by Michael A. Dirr) are of some, but limited, help as many of the plants in garden centers were introduced after the books were published. Do you wonder if the hydrangea bubble is near the bursting point? (Seriously, take your smartphone or iPad and Google, and look at the plants that interest you. At least that should give you a photo and basic information; perhaps even gardeners’ comments.)

    However, the best way to decide what hydrangeas you might want for your garden is to visit other gardens and hope the plants are labeled or the owner knows their names. Europeans are mad for hydrangeas, and there are large collections and festivals in England, France, and Belgium. Corinne Mallet has put together probably the world’s largest collection, upward of 1,200 taxa (species and cultivars) over the last 30 years at Jardin Shamrock, a nonprofit garden in Varengeville sur Mer in Normandy. It is an astonishing feat.

    I cannot recommend specific mopheads or lacecaps, except to say the Bluebird and Blue Billow lacecaps are reliable and integrate well with other trees and shrubs in my shady garden. For hedges and mass plantings of mopheads, it’s difficult to get past the newish, repeat blooming Endless Summer or Nikko Blue. A quick look through Dr. Dirr’s book illustrates dozens of luscious alternatives in better colors.

    Mopheads seem much more susceptible to late frosts than lacecaps. I snip off just the flower heads when they begin to look tatty in November or December, but wait until late April or even early May before pruning them. A late frost can kill the flowering tips of exposed ends.

    Aside from its tendency to flop, H. arborescens Annabelle is among the most elegant of hydrangeas. A new cultivar, Incrediball, lives up to its name. The circular flower heads can be 16 inches in diameter and the stems remain upright. Like Annabelle, its flowers are lime green early in the season, maturing to white, and then changing back to lime.

 The jury is still out: Are the heads too large and the stems too straight? Only time will tell. Next year make up your own mind with a visit to the Mimi Meehan Native Plant Garden behind Clinton Academy in East Hampton, where the entrance is banked with them. For comparison, wander over to the small green in front of Ralph Lauren’s RRL shop in the center of the village where Annabelle holds court.

    The panicle hydrangeas are probably the hardiest and toughest of the lot. Unlike others, they flourish in full sun. Popular in tree form as well as multi-stemmed bushes, the softly billowy PeeGee and the pyramidal Tardiva are ubiquitous. Limelight, which received an outstanding rating at a Royal Horticultural Society trial at Wisley, south of London, is growing in popularity. After seeing the double Hayes Starburst in a friend’s garden, I was delighted to find a plant earlier this season at a New England nursery.

    There are a multitude of other selections, including a number whose flowers change to various shades of pink and red. Take advantage of this outpouring of hydrangea cultivars. Get as many as you like and can obtain while the bubble is still intact and growing. A friend is excited by a pink flower edged in white he discovered in a local garden center. I found a groundcover and a purple lacecap online at Wilkerson Mill Gardens (hydrangea.com). The fun is in the process. If they are keepers, great! If not, shovel, prune, and move on.

   Remember when Grandma used to talk about how they did it in the old days, pulling shut all the drapes and leaving them shut when the sun came up and how that kept the house cool all day? Michael Haverland does. The architect not only uses floor-length drapes — two-sided for insulation — in his own house on Cove Hollow Road in East Hampton, he urges them on his clients all the time, he said on a Friday in late July. It’s one example of his belief that simple, practical solutions are best.

    With the house’s 12-foot ceilings and walls of glass, he really needs those drapes. As if the walls weren’t dazzling enough, the drapes add drama, recalling as they do a movie theater. In this case, what they open to reveal is an expanse of travertine patio, the waters of a 25-meter lap pool as narrow as a moat, and a lush lawn giving onto an explosion of tall foliage.

    Mr. Haverland scouted out land by bicycle and eventually came upon a deep flag lot where he could let his designer’s hair down. “It’s horrible. I don’t think I can live here,” his partner, Philip Galanes, said when he saw the property. “You’d better make it good.” Mr. Galanes, an entertainment attorney and novelist, perhaps best known as the “Social Q’s” columnist for The New York Times, is also an interior designer and furniture collector.

    “The goal was to build a glass box to hold all his furniture,” Mr. Haverland said, laughing. He built the 3,000-square-foot house, which has the feel of a loft dropped to the first floor, in 2004. It was the first of a half dozen projects he has completed here. “I’m lucky it was good,” he said, explaining that it has become something of model. “I’ve had people ask me if it’s from the 1960s. I’m happy about that; it can’t be dated.”

    “The question was how to make a modern house that doesn’t feel like a California modern house. You can’t transplant a style to a different environment. My work out here is connected here, and every project is different — true to the site and to the client.”

    He’s in the early design stage for a house in Beverly Hills. “Everything is different there — the light, the heat. It doesn’t cool off at night in the same way. In that climate you can do more indoor-outdoor living. There are really only two months you can do that here. We rarely use the double doors or open up the entire house. . . . But even in bad weather, it’s bright and cheery.”

    “The windows echo the French architecture of the 1940s and ’50s, or the factory windows of New England,” Mr. Haverland said. The expanse of glass is broken up by steel mullions into 30-by-37-inch panes. The mullions are thin, which required tricky engineering, yet somehow they feel sheltering. “You get a sense of enclosure from them,” he said. “It’s modern yet cozy.”

    If Mr. Haverland, who taught urban design at Yale for 10 years, has an architectural philosophy, it is that “simple forms are easier to build and more economical.” Thus the work “becomes more about the proportion of the space, rather than establishing interest through sculptural space. A designer has a choice: Form? Or texture and details?”

    Among the details in the East Hampton house are a Victorian-era oak door, metal doorknobs from an 1898 school, and old-fashioned push-button light switches — one for on, one for off. “It’s simple, tactile.”

    As are two museum-style partitions inventively placed in the open floor plan between the dining and living room areas. Toward the rear of the living space, the ceiling drops to 10 feet in the bedrooms.

    Mr. Haverland’s office, tucked between the main room and the bedrooms, has a splash of color courtesy of a pink leather Eames chair commissioned by Mary Kay, the cosmetics magnate. Personal effects include an early mockup of Mr. Galanes’s column and sketches by Robert Venturi, the influential architect and writer. Mr. Venturi became a mentor when Mr. Haverland worked for him in Philadelphia for a time. 

    Mr. Venturi is a fan of an East End landmark, the Big Duck in Flanders, and in his book “Learning From Las Vegas,” published in the 1970s, he used it in positing a theory that architecture can be divided into two categories, ducks and decorated sheds. Is it, in essence, an artistic expression, or is it functional?

    “The best architecture is anachronistic,” Mr. Haverland said. “It can live through cycles of style and taste.” The South Fork’s traditional Shingle Style, for instance, “transcends trendiness — when done well. What you see being built out here is a hybrid of the old and the new, but often you get the worst of both.”

    In his practice he has a hand in everything, soup to nuts, often with a couple of projects in the works at once. While he may have a predilection for vast banks of windows, he said he has no signature style and is always looking to branch out. Now that he’s here nearly all the time, he said he would enjoy doing a Shingle Style house from scratch. Maybe show them how it’s done.

Marco Zanuso chairs in the living room are covered in blue velvet.

A partition that walls off the dining area is hung with a Leo Bersamina work of photographic portraits cut into starburst shapes.

A watercolor by Robert Harms of Southampton adorns a wall of the main bedroom.

On the other side of the dining area, a second partition shows another work by Robert Harms.