Habitat

    ‘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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   Feng shui is the practice of adjusting one’s immediate environment to harmonize the inner self with outward activities. Everything in our immediate surroundings has a physical and psychological effect on us — for good or bad — and the goal of feng shui is to achieve maximum health and well-being by enhancing those surroundings.

   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.

   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.

   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.

    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.

   When Pietro Nivola and Katherine Stahl decided to move and reconstruct the house he inherited on Old Stone Highway in Springs, they may not have anticipated how complicated the project would be or that it would take five years.

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    Mr. Nivola, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has spent all his summers there since early childhood. His parents, the sculptor Costantino Nivola and Ruth Nivola, a jewelry designer, bought the approximately 32-acre property, with a house and barn that date to the 1750s, in 1948.

   To what can we attribute the enduring popularity of hostas? They can be likened to the Helen of Troy or Cleopatra of the floral world, seducing non-gardening homeowners and casual and obsessed gardeners alike.

    All this passion for a plant that can be destroyed by deer, voles, and slugs. In my own garden the voles sometimes get them even when they are sunk into the ground in plastic pots.

As they had with their studio and living space in Manhattan’s Chelsea, G. Phillip Smith and Douglas Thompson were planning to start from scratch when they built a house for themselves on the East End. The partners, who met at the Columbia School of Architecture, spent two years looking for a suitable lot, where they could exercise their Modernist sensibility in a tranquil setting.  

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    In any other format or site, a container show is pretty much what you would expect it to be, a lovely but restrained affair. The LongHouse Reserve, however, is anything but typical. Its container show burst out of its confined format practically from the beginning.

    Tucked into the front corner of a spacious property in East Hampton Village, where a green lawn edged with a jumble of wild plants spreads down to meet a finger of Hook Pond, is a little old house with timeless charm.

    Like others built here in the 19th century, it was moved to its present site. Old wall and ceiling beams give evidence of its age,

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    When he was only 10, Michael Derrig’s mother bought him a circular saw.           “I built my first brick patio when I was 11,” the landscape architect and founder of Landscape Details in Sag Harbor said with obvious pride.

    When he was 14, his widowed mother would hoist a ladder onto her car and drive him to his weekend house-painting jobs. “I was always very entrepreneurial. I gave a fair price and got the job done. I got a lot of work that way.”

    To discover new garden-worthy plants you don’t have to slip and slide through snowmelt or scramble across unstable screes on remote mountaintops in Turkey as I did with great glee last month. All that is needed are visits to fine public and private gardens.

    That is how three of the new plants I’m most excited about made it to the Garden Club of East Hampton’s plant sale at the Mulford Farm tomorrow evening and Saturday morning.

    What to do when the indispensable trowel gets lost together with the hand-held shears. One has lost one’s hands, fingers. One is doomed to not garden that day.

And why has this happened when the trowel and the secateurs are indeed one’s hands, the wrists inutile without them? God help one’s psyche. What ruin and havoc will be next?

    Those who might be tired of the same old East Hampton houses can have a taste of Southampton living this weekend with the Insider’s View of Southampton Homes tour offered by the Southampton Historical Museum on Saturday from 1 to 4:30 p.m.

    Stanley and Susan Reifer's Chinese garden, hidden in the woods north of Bridgehampton, is something to behold. With a traditional moon gate, stone bridges, inlaid paths, waterfalls, and ponds with the requisite koi along with weeping cherry trees and oriental plants, the landscape takes those lucky enough to visit to another realm.

    “I guess it's part of my search for immortality,”Mr. Reifer said, explaining that he wanted to create what is known in China as a scholar's garden. “But if you ask my wife,” he said, “she'll tell you it's just sheer lunacy.”

    Look at photographs and paintings of early 20th-century gardens on the East End and what do you see: roses, first and foremost. Climbing roses, frothy with blooms overflowing pergolas, arbors, walls, and fences. At the very pinnacle of high fashion were beds filled with the new, repeat flowering China and tea roses, surrounded by low clipped hedges of boxwood.

    Surprise of surprises, ornamental grasses crop up, used in a variety of ways.

    It may come as a surprise that a Dutch colonial house built in 1920 would epitomize an Italian minimalist style. But, after modest renovations, that is just how one would describe a Bridgehampton house today.

     East of the Bridgehampton School, between the Montauk Highway and fields farmed by the McCoy family, the property also has a barn and several outbuildings, including a guest house.

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   When one thinks of garden and landscape photography, it is often of color-saturated vistas and floral abundance. But when Leslie Rose Close gave a talk on Sunday afternoon about the history of garden photography, it was some time before the first color slide appeared, and the effect was jarring.

   A diorama of Montauk’s original fishing village is the first thing visitors see when they walk through the door of the East Hampton Town Marine Museum on Bluff Road, Amagansett. There’s a reason. Nothing represents the history of fishing in Montauk better than the community on Fort Pond Bay of hardy fishing families, which was all but wiped out by the 1938 Hurricane.

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Conrad and Josie Goerl’s showpiece overlooking Northwest Harbor has been transformed into model of green energy and design -- with an infusion of color from the hot palette of Ms. Goerl’s native Brazil.

   It’s a wonderful time of year on the East End. A quintessential day can include a winter beach walk and an afternoon before a blazing fire.            For the most part, the love of nature and a real crackling fire has trumped local interest in gas fireplaces. But, slowly, house by house, a conversion is happening. Unlike Colorado, we do not have a code banning wood-burning fireplaces. Yet.

What child wouldn’t want to have a 1,200-square-foot playhouse? And then, as a grown-up, actually live in it? That is what Molly Ginna did.       The house, a former church at the corner of Division and Latham Streets in Sag Harbor, was built in 1897. Ms. Ginna’s mother bought it in the early 1960s, when, as the People’s Baptist Church, it was failing to sustain a congregation and the building was falling into disrepair.

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Hans Vandebovenkamp, who has fulfilled more than 100 commissions for his massive sculptures and had more than 50 one-man shows in different parts of the world, has executed perhaps his largest — living — sculpture to date in Sagaponack, where he and his late wife, Siv Cedering, set about transforming a former horse farm into a sculpture park, replete with chickens and golden pheasants.

    It may have been a hay barn at one time, but Tracy and David Gavant and their daughters call it the “happy house.” The Amagansett building, just off Main Street, dates to the early 19th century, but with expansion and some updating, it feels quirky, but modern.

    The Charles H. Adams house, a newly restored Queen Anne-style gem on Lee Avenue in East Hampton, is impressive at any distance, but up close the fine craftsmanship is jaw-dropping.

    “It’s what makes the house unique,” Marsha Soffer said. Ms. Soffer oversaw the two-year restoration on behalf of the Fine Greenwald Foundation, a private charitable organization that inherited the house from her  uncle, Martin Fine, in 2008. She is a member of its board.

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    Most educated people today realize that we have been frying the planet with unsustainable practices in building, in transportation, in almost everything we do. Many would build an efficient house if they realized how easy it would be, if it didn’t add that much to the cost, and if it would not have to be ugly.

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    When Robert Stansel and Tammy Marek of Portland, Ore., saw a rendering of what an architect hoped to build on property on Green Hollow Road in East Hampton, they were intrigued. Three years later, Maziar Behrooz’s Arc House is almost finished. The couple have been living in it since last winter, although they travel back and forth to the West Coast.

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    Look up the word ecletic in the dictionary, and it may just have a picture of Wilsonville, a shop off Amagansett’s main drag, as the definition.

    The space, down a gravel path behind 216 Main Street and directly across from the Amagansett Library, is not the typical chockablock antiques store, although there are antiques, and many of them; nor is it a gallery, although it features art in every medium from the last century or so.

    Having survived a move from one place to another, a history of scandal and rumor, and seizure by the federal government, the Stafford Hedges house in East Hampton has remained intact for more than 230 years.

    William Ronan, who was chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and a close friend of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, moved the house from its original site on Pantigo Road (where a branch of the Hildreth department store is now) to Cross Highway, tucked between Middle and Hither Lanes, in 1954.

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