Design: A Family-Built House
A double dead end, seclusion at the bottom of a steep driveway, and graceful stands of tall trees are what sold Peter Whelan and his then wife-to-be, Linley Pennebaker, back in 1980 on the site.
"We came down and thought we were in the Appalachian mountains. The elevation is about 80 feet above sea level."
Tucked into the hills of Noyac near Jessup's Neck and the Morton Wildlife Sanctuary, the acre and a half is part of a kettlehole left by the last glacier. Mr. and Mrs. Whelan and his three brothers cleared the land and built the house, which was completed in 1983. The couple and their four young children live in it today.
"The idea of the house is living in the woods," Mr. Whelan said. Every room has a balcony and one or two doors going outside, 11 in all. The house has six skylights and 40 windows. "They don't all match, but it's fine," Mrs. Whelan added.
First Things First
Deciding to build from the bottom up, they dug 10 feet below grade and nestled the first floor into the base of the slope. Over the course of the next two years, two more floors were built.
The house is something of a paradox: elegant on the outside, simple within. The first things you notice as you descend the driveway are the gently curved lines of its different roofs.
"The house is sort of shingle style with 'hip' dormers and roofs," said Mr. Whelan, who spent two years in China and Japan, where he became enamored of pagodas. "We wanted the house to have a soft look against the hill," he said.
Can Watch The Stars
On the first floor are an office, an open kitchen, and two living rooms. "The kids are sort of noisy and wild and needed their own space," Mrs. Whelan said. The children's living room also has a dining area.
The second living room, for adults, has four large couches and easily seats 30, which helps the Whelans entertain at family gatherings. Mr. Whelan's siblings outnumber his wife's; she is one among eight while he is one of 12.
A corner of the living room has a three-story-high atrium topped by a wraparound skylight that lets light pour in. The master bedroom is directly over the living room on the second floor and shares the same light. "We watch shooting stars at night," Mrs. Whelan said.
Also upstairs are their daughter's bedroom, and a second room where the three boys sleep "barracks style." There are four walkout porches on the second floor, and a fifth porch on the not yet finished third floor.
Camping Out
Much of the wood in the Whelans' house came from northern Vermont, where the Whelan and Koncelik families built rustic cabins 25 years ago. The kitchen counter, for instance, is a long, free-form length of wood from a Vermont tree. Many of the pine floor boards, some 20 inches wide, came from Vermont too.
"It was hard building," Mrs. Whelan recalls. "We were working all day at our jobs, so we'd build in the evenings and camp out." The largest problem came in trying to stabilize the back side of the hill, much of it sand.
"We terraced the hill with railroad ties and plantings of forsythia, weigela, and mock orange - whatever grew fast," Mrs. Whelan explained. Nonetheless, they endured several years of flooding until the land was safely reshaped. "Terracing is mud and water control," she said with authority.
Pure Water
They also ran into a lot of clay when they dug their well. "We ended up having to go down 160 feet," Mr. Whelan said. But in an area where many of the neighbors have contaminated well water from the chemicals used on the nearby Noyac Golf Course, their water is pure.
The house is 2,500 square feet, but looks bigger, undoubtedly because of the large number of windows and doors. "They cut down the boundaries between inside and out," Mr. Whelan said.
Building a homestead is nothing new to a member of the Whelan family. Peter Whelan's parents, Duane and Mary Whelan, moved to East Hampton in 1949. Together with Duane Whelan's sister and brother-in-law, Doris and Lawrence Koncelik, they bought 40 acres of woodland in Northwest Woods, East Hampton, and built simple cabins, with privies, in a sheltered hollow.
A Privy?
Several years later both families, working together, built larger houses using kits from the Warehouser Lumber Company and lived largely off the land. The two families had 22 children between them, and quite a few have built their own houses.
"I finished my father's house off when I was in eighth grade," said Mr. Whelan, a builder who was the contractor for the Bay Street Theatre renovation of its Long Wharf space in Sag Harbor. His father, the East Hampton Town attorney for many years, died two years ago.
Mr. and Mrs. Whelan share a bathroom with their sons, and therein lies a tale. "When Peter was building the house he'd say, 'Now this is where the privy is going to be?' I said, 'A privy? I want a toilet.' Peter said, 'You are really spoiled.' So my mother sent us this beautiful green toilet," Mrs. Whelan said.
Casual Life
Compared to his childhood in Northwest, Mr. Whelan said, "This is luxurious here. . . . We didn't get electricity in the big house until 1964."
Linley Whelan is the daughter of the well-known documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker of Sag Harbor. Until two years ago, she owned and operated Provisions, a Sag Harbor health food store. "Peter and I met at Provisions," she said.
The furnishings of their house are casual, if not even haphazard. For that matter, so are the grounds. A wreck of a sailboat given to Mr. Whelan by a friend sits in one corner of the front yard, as does an old merry-go-round from St. Andrew's Catholic Church in Sag Harbor. Wildflowers abound and pet rabbits scamper loose. To encourage reading and outdoor projects among the children, the cable TV connection has been turned off.
"Peter and I are not sticklers for perfection," Mrs. Whelan said, pointing to a wall on which the children had left some drawings and to a deep gouge left by a baseball bat. "Some people would be quite neurotic about it, but this is our life and it's always going to be this way."
"The house has turned into a real paradise for us and the children," Mrs. Whelan said.