This photograph shows a house that once stood at 81 Dunemere Lane, built for Myrtle Shepherd in 1937. The photo ended up at the door of the Long Island Collection on a recent Monday morning. The donor indicated that the inscription on the back came from Martha Brookfield, the architect’s wife, who noted that the house “shook” East Hampton, since it was “not traditional.”
I was intrigued at first because the house was commissioned by a woman identified by her own name, rather than her husband’s, a rare occurrence in the 1930s, and then my curiosity grew — who was she and why had she built this modern house?
Born in Minnesota, Myrtle Abby Leach Shepherd (1885-1964) was married to James G. Shepherd (1867-1935), a coal executive. The couple divorced by 1923 after having two daughters, a progressive decision for the time. James, a serious art collector, remarried in 1925 and retained his own estate in Wainscott.
Between 1923 and 1937, Myrtle owned a house on Lee Avenue that continually appeared in the “Summer Colony” list of rented cottages in The East Hampton Star, and she was active in the social scene here and in New York. The East Hampton Social Guide listed her Manhattan address as 510 Park Avenue and the Plaza Hotel. She regularly traveled between New York and Europe on luxurious ocean liners like the R.M.S. Mauretania.
G. Piers Brookfield, the architect who designed Myrtle’s modern house, graduated from M.I.T. and Oxford University, and did his postgraduate work at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts. In 1926, after two years in Europe, he returned to the United States, settling in Queens. By 1940, he was on the board of the Fine Arts Federation of New York, and was active in the American Institute of Architects and published in US Modernist, an architectural design publication.
With the Myrtle Shepherd House, Brookfield’s design was clearly influenced by contemporary architecture trends, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, the International Style, and the Bauhaus movement.
Andrea Meyer is the head of the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection.
