Some Hamptons houses are designed for the beach. Others seek drier land and assume a more modest presence. Such was the case with this home in Springs, that woodsier, more discreet, mostly inland hamlet adjacent to East Hampton. “The most important design process for us,” says Robin Klein, the interior designer for the project, along with her business partner, Deborah Antar, “was to make this home not look, quote unquote, like a typical Hamptons beach house, though there’ nothing wrong that either.” As Antar adds, “Organic is a word that kept coming up for us and the clients, a lovely couple with two young children, in that this was a house they could use as a respite year-round, with nothing too precious.” And as John Berg remarks, the architect in charge of transforming the plain-Jane structure into something far prettier, “This is a really nice family and Deb and Robin and I all along could really see them living in this house, enjoying it, whereas prior to our work, they were just making do.”
Making do in the house meant that while it was full of life with the family and their frequently visiting relatives (the wife’s family is from Italy), it was also chopped up and rambling. The designers and architect worked together, as Berg says, “from the start to finish.” Berg’s role, in part, was to reconfigure the interiors by opening up the floor plan to create a great room encompassing a living, dining, and kitchen. “Working with Robin and Deb, we redesigned the entry sequence,” meaning that at the front door, one can now see directly through the house to the pool.
The Macchia Vecchia countertop from Artistic Tile was fabricated and installed by Bridgehampton Stone & Mosaic. An Apparatus fixture hovers over the island. Cabinetry is by Dereky Patterson.
Custom 1940s-style chairs are upholstered in a light honey-colored shearling. The fireplace surround is a handmade glazed tile by Pratt + Larson from Artistic Tile.
Custom sling chair by Jose Fine Furniture by Jose Gonzalez. The painting is a mid-century oil abstract.
An unwieldy columned porch was replaced with a striking form that was “carved” into the existing structure.
Indeed, the exterior entrance, too, was changed, not only for curbside/roadside appeal, but also to make a statement that a family spends time here throughout the year, not just summers. Berg “carved a new entrance into the existing house” where there had once been an unwieldy columned porch. The recessed arrival point is announced with a handsome steel and glass wall and door, framed by sidelights.
Prior to the two designers establishing their firm, Antar Klein Design, Antar had worked on the client’s Upper West Side apartment, some twenty years earlier. “She’s a wonderful, beautiful person,” Klein says of the client, “and then as life unfolded and she married and now has a family, she and her husband purchased this house and soon wanted changes after some years of living there.”
The designers and Berg convinced the clients that the piecemeal approach they had been taking to furnishing and updating required, instead, a whole sale redoing. Among the most dramatic changes occurred in the kitchen, a wholly new room in which Klein and Antar fashioned a 16-foot island, its surface clad in a polished Macchia Vecchia Calacatta marble, which acts like an exclamation point in the room. The space assumes an even bigger personality with Berg’s addition of a skylight, of the same scale and dimension as that of an existing one hovering over the den. “We wanted to get those two elements to balance and make aesthetic sense,” he says.
While Antar’s and Klein’s penchant for establishing and adhering to a consistent palette is evident in every space, it’s in the living room that their work is especially conspicuous. A fireplace wall is clad in an arrestingly beautiful copper-hued tile from Pratt + Larson, a color that echoes those on the floor’s antique kilim that served as the starting point for the decor. Meanwhile, for the family den, the designers chose armless sofas with cognac-colored details, set on a shag carpet, the whole illuminated by day via the skylight and at night with a lighting fixture whose glow is softened with a fabric shade.
So happy are the clients with the house that, as Antar says, “While the décor will likely stay in place, things are constantly changing in the household as the children grow and relatives and friends come and go.” Klein concurs by adding, “Yes, they like the look we achieved so much that I have a feeling we could go back anytime and maybe even find the same dish in the sink.”
