Habitat

The Southampton Historical Museum will hold its annual house tour on Saturday at houses throughout Southampton Village and beyond. Now in its fifth year, the tour will include several houses as well as St. Andrew’s Church of the Dunes, the Thomas Halsey Homestead, and the 1708 House inn, which will also serve refreshments.

    St. Luke’s Episcopal Church’s annual house and garden tour, this year including six private properties in and around the village of East Hampton, will take place on May 10 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The evening before, May 9, from 6:30 to 8:30, a cocktail party will be held at a newly built classic cottage-style house on Ocean Avenue as a fund-raiser for the church’s community outreach programs.

Most people have had their fill of snow this winter, but our gardens would fare much better if they remained covered by a blanket of snow until the jet stream changes and the cycle of freeze-thaw gives way to stable, moderating temperatures.

   Barbara Macklowe has a passion for photography and says it has taken over her life. After retiring from the family’s antiques gallery, she took several trips around the world, honing her picture-taking skills along the way. Self-taught, she learned by doing. She couldn’t put down her camera during two trips to India, one in 2004 and another in 2005, she said, and it changed her “forever.”

   Barbara Feldman, an East Hampton interior designer, has found her calling, and it turns out to be a composite of her previous careers. A former designer of commercial and medical interiors, a real estate agent, and a house stager, she reinvented herself not long ago after analyzing the demographics of the South Fork and realizing that a plethora of young families live here. “They need a different kind of design,” she said.

    My husband planted Jerusalem artichokes in his East Hampton vegetable garden last fall. He ordered them from an online catalog that a friend had recommended. They looked like pieces of ginger root — that light brown color and that gnarled shape. My husband made an area for them along the north side of the garden fence, and then he planted the tubers about three inches down in the ground. He installed a mesh barrier about six inches deep around the area to prevent underground traveling creatures from eating the tubers. And that was it.

   Last year, my brothers and I sold our family home: a little 100-year-old pink stucco house at the end of a road, surrounded by a golf course and water. Exquisite. It was a painful time whose time had come. I was ready for a little “city living,” having neighbors close by, restaurants that stayed open year round, and no pop-up shops for twerking tweens. (Sorry, East Hampton Village, but you have become dismal in winter and downright silly in summer.) I made plans to move to Sag Harbor.

    The house is purple. Inside and out: painted cedar planks on the exterior and tongue-in-groove millwork in the interior. The overarching aesthetic is startling given the setting in tall white-pine woods in East Hampton’s Northwest — a setting that prompted the modernist architect Don Chappell to suggest vibrant color for dramatic contrast. At least that’s how it all used to be. Today, if you take a careful look you will find a recent addition that has a calming effect.

    In a grove of cedars in the woods of Springs, Marcia Previti and Peter Gumpel have taken architecture into an unexpected, although appropriate, realm: the outdoors.

    The couple, who are architects, have lived in a “raised ranch, split-level, postmodern bungalow” (in their words) for 22 years. In the course of those two-plus decades, they have taken the art and science of constructing buildings and, one could say, turned it inside out, creating a series of outdoor “rooms” filled with surprise.

The seamless integration of house and garden with the landscape is the ideal, even the Holy Grail, of garden and landscape design. Here on the East End a few jewels meet the challenge.

    Recently, I was introduced to a place on the bay in Springs that meets that ideal. Thanks to the Cultural Landscape Foundation, one of a series of garden dialogues throughout the country was held at the home of Bob and Margo Alexander in which Thomas Balsley, a prominent landscape architect who helped create the Alexanders’ garden, spoke about the process.

After years of speculation about the project, those with the golden ticket, like in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” got a glimpse inside a model apartment and a view from the rooftop.

    After a sojourn in Southampton last year, the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons’ garden tour, now in its 27th year, returns to East Hampton on June 15. The tour features six private gardens, complimentary admission to the Much Ado About Madoo garden market sale in Sagaponack, and a separate cocktail reception.

    Highlights include the gardens of two landscape designers, Craig James Socia’s Craigmoor property on Accabonac Road and that of Michael Derrig and his wife, Dwyer, on Buell Lane Extension.

    The Madoo Conservancy is celebrating its 20th birthday with a two-day gardening event that will combine socializing, shopping, and education all in the verdant and captivating environment of Robert Dash’s home and public garden in Sagaponack.

   One person’s trash is another’s treasure was Bryan and Michele Gosman’s mantra as they assembled the pieces of what is now their dream house.

    On a cul-de-sac called Beach Hollow Court, nestled next to a reserve in Montauk, the land was once part of a 25-acre estate with a storied past. It was known as the Jackson estate, for the artist Elbert McGran Jackson, and was quite a showplace. Originally laid out by Andrew J. Thomas, an architect, he had “a main house, a greenhouse, and a watchtower,” Ms. Gosman said last week. And there was more.

   Six noted designers and decorators who live or work on the South Fork have staged an unusual showhouse that will open this weekend as a benefit for the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons. They have taken over six rooms in the organization’s thrift shop, on the Montauk Highway in Sagaponack, and decorated them on intriguing themes. Grace Coddington, the creative director of Vogue, is the honorary chairwoman.

   Victorian-era houses in Southampton Village are still prevalent, but many have lost their original style and flavor due to a modern preference for a cleaner, more open feeling. At least one Victorian in the village’s downtown, however, maintains its qualities both inside and out with a sensitive renovation that retains its character while accommodating a contemporary lifestyle.

Designed from the start to work in tandem with the museum, the grounds will evoke the rural features of the area and the museum structure, which the Swiss architects describe as an “agrarian vernacular shed.”

The final piece of a puzzle complicated by warring factions and an acrimonious lawsuit fell into place last Thursday, when an overwhelming number of time-share owners voted to accept an offer from 290 Old Montauk Associates, a corporation headed by a New Jersey developer who invests in distressed real estate with an eye to turning it around and reselling it.

   The history that runs so deep on the South Fork is matched by a passion for it and, too often, by a willingness to destroy it. For notorious example, Wick’s Tavern in Bridgehampton, once catering to drinkers and gossips at the same Main Street intersection as two historic houses that made it to the 21st century, the Nathaniel Rogers House and the Bull’s Head Inn. Wick’s Tavern dated from the end of the 17th century yet was leveled in 1941 so a gas station could rise in its place. (It’s gone now, too, and won’t be missed.)

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By Ellen T. White

    It’s the lament of our time: We demand to be connected to the world 24/7, while still longing to get away from it all. When Alison and Andy Brod began rebuilding their Bridgehampton house, they embraced the contradiction. They envisioned a streamlined design with dramatic details — a stage set, in essence, where they could entertain up to 100 clients and friends, which they do routinely on summer weekends. At the same time, they wanted a place where weekend house guests might find a Zen retreat and their boys, who are 5 and 7, could play undisturbed.

   The East Hampton Historical Society’s ever-popular house and garden tour will be held on Saturday with an advance cocktail celebration tomorrow evening.

   Even if you can’t put a name to the Montauk Association houses, also known as the Seven Sisters, you have probably seen and admired them from afar while driving away from the Montauk Light. Look southwest from the highway and you see a collection of just-right-size Shingle Style cottages, each set on a little rise in the moorlands, surrounded by acres and acres of wild woods and tangled underbrush ending at the bluffs.

   Like a whirlwind tour across the globe, a walk through Mady Schuman’s spacious house, tucked away in the woods of Amagansett, offers a glimpse of the common threads that run through disparate artistic objects.

   The Isaac Osborn House at 88 Newtown Lane was erected during a decade when the Mexican-American War was fought, the postage stamp was invented, and the few buildings in East Hampton Village were surrounded by farmland. It, too, was once a farmhouse, in the middle of hundreds of livestock-filled acres that stretched all the way to Cedar Street, 35 acres in a straight line.

   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.”

   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.

   Yellow chard, of all things, is the “it” plant in Parisian gardens this year.  During a sunny and warm week in early September, the light was at the perfect angle to show off the luminosity of its stems.

    Yellow chard was the star of gardens from a small, well-used and loved neighborhood park in the Marais to potagers in an interior courtyard in the 16th century Hotel de Carnavalet, and in an extravaganza of urban agriculture at the renowned Bagatelle Gardens in the Bois de Boulogne.

   You don’t have to be some old salt with proud memories of swung fists and splintered pool cues at the Black Buoy to know that Sag Harbor was once a place with roughneck bars, little eateries run by annoyed cranks, a puzzling superfluity of gas stations, and the ragged glory of 19th-century manses fallen into decrepitude.

    But here’s a question. Can a house embody the history, the resurrection, of a village? David Bray would say yes. Twice over.

Designers fulfill their dream of a magical, but high tech, beach house

   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.