So attuned to each other are interior designer Stephen Knollenberg and his longtime client Sarah Cuyler that, as he says, “We can talk about a particular toss pillow for three days.” In fact, Knollenberg and Cuyler have tossed many a pillow at each other during the 12 years that he has spent designing interiors of four apartments, three houses, a yacht, and a private plane for her.
Admittedly restless, Cuyler has finally settled into a full-time residence in Sag Harbor. After she and Knollenberg performed a complete gut on the circa-1990 neo-Colonial, they began furnishing the rooms of the four-bedroom dwelling. Upon first seeing the house at the end of its long driveway, atop a hill a mile-and-a-half outside the town center, she recalls, “Given the setting, with one side a protected conservancy and the other dense woods, the house could have been standing on four sticks and I would have taken it.”
True to its period style, the interiors, however, were, perhaps, too period-perfect. Knollenberg describes the original rooms as a “bit kitschy,” adding that the former owners had gone to great pains to make it a letter-perfect Colonial, with old-time mantels and door hinges out of ye-olde taverns.” A total gutting and reconfiguring transformed the home into something still Colonialesque on the outside, but fresh, bright, and modern on the inside. Knollenberg’s floorplan changes included flipping the main staircase from the front of the house to the rear, moving the kitchen forward, and tearing down a small barn to replace it with a vaulted den and spacious first-floor primary suite.
A Stark rug grounds the living room and is accompanied by a sofa from Dune.
The artwork is by D.F. Cuyler, and the coffee table is from Eric Appel.
In the dining room, a framed vintage flag from Gustavo Olivieri Antiques hangs above a cabinet by Børge Mogensen from Wyeth.
Drawings by Otto Zitko and Jackson Pollock hang above a sofa from Lona in the library.
A ceiling fixture by Noguchi hangs above a bed from Poltrona Frau. The bed covering is by Sferra.
Landscape design by Charlie & Sons Landscapes is shown in the backyard.
The chaises and umbrellas by the pool are from Thayer’s Hardware & Patio.
Knollenberg fondly describes Cuyler as having “a fun, creative, Bohemian vibe about her.” She, too, describes herself as “a little more Bohemian in nature,” admitting: “If left to my own devices, I would create chaos. Stephen sets the tone for me.” When conceiving the palette and arrangement of rooms, Knollenberg says that he and Cuyler agreed “to make something dynamic. I wanted to reinterpret the Hamptons ‘vibe’ but turn it, twist it a little bit, reimagine it into something more modern but still keep the elements expected in a house like this, such as the wide plank floors.”
Not surprisingly, furnishing the home became its own challenge—cherry-picking and salvaging items from her other residences, which included an apartment in The Mark Hotel on NYC’s Upper East Side (one that she shared with her late husband) and a house in Birmingham, Michigan (the lovely Detroit suburb where Knollenberg has his main office). While Knollenberg, who also also has an office in Manhattan, kept to his preferred neutral backdrop, employing Benjamin Moore’s White Dover throughout, he was careful and strategic in his placement of colors, forms, and textures. A cabinet covered in a red leather animates the bright foyer, while the stairway wall is hung with a string of gold-leafed butterflies that appear to be aflutter when hit with the slightest of breezes. He put an inviting daybed at the end of one side of the long living room, and he hung mercury-glass elements in a guest bedroom that take on the effect of giant water droplets. He chose the biggest Noguchi paper lamp he could find to hang over the bed in the primary suite. “A room with a vaulted ceiling like that needs a dramatic fixture,” he says. “And it felt a little BoHo, in keeping with Sarah’s personality.”
Also, given Cuyler’s extensive collection of artworks—pieces by Motherwell, Joan Mitchell, Pollack, as well as many vibrant abstract canvases by her late mother, Deborah F. Cuyler, who died way too young to have achieved the status she deserved—the white of the walls allows every piece to emerge in full.
“Stephen is a very collaborative designer,” Cuyler says, “but he’s also a little bit insistent, meaning that he knows how much I respect his sense of scale, and I let him choose things to fit that. I cannot do scale or placement. He’s spot on with all that. He’s particular in a way that’s cohesive. Every time I walk inside, I think that he’s created a great little cocoon up here for me.”