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Sam’s Creek Residence in Long Island, N.Y.

A Long Island house brings order and inspiration to a multitrack family life.

4 MIN READ

By Bruce D. Snider

March 12, 2013

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Courtesy Bates Masi + Architects

A glass-walled living-and-dining pavilion is flanked by wings ho… Read More A glass-walled living-and-dining pavilion is flanked by wings holding more private spaces.

Courtesy Bates Masi + Architects

The entry walk’s travertine surface flows through the central … Read More The entry walk’s travertine surface flows through the central pavilion to the backyard’s patio and pool deck.

Courtesy Bates Masi + Architects

Bronze plates clad the fireplace that divides the living and din… Read More Bronze plates clad the fireplace that divides the living and dining areas. 

Courtesy Bates Masi + Architects

The house’s interlocking, open-ended forms direct views toward… Read More The house’s interlocking, open-ended forms direct views toward landscaped yards, screening out neighboring houses at both sides.

Courtesy Bates Masi + Architects

Rectilinear planting beds and patios project the architecture’… Read More Rectilinear planting beds and patios project the architecture’s geometry into the landscape.

Courtesy Bates Masi + Architects

Because the alcohol-burning fireplace requires not exhaust to th… Read More Because the alcohol-burning fireplace requires not exhaust to the outdoors, its hood leads to a skylight rather than a chimney.

Courtesy Bates Masi + Architects

The hearth is a tray filled with brass BBs.

Courtesy Bates Masi + Architects

The kitchen island is faced with the same mahogany that covers t… Read More The kitchen island is faced with the same mahogany that covers the building’s interior and exterior walls.

Courtesy Bates Masi + Architects

The island’s plate-steel countertop has a recessed drainboard … Read More The island’s plate-steel countertop has a recessed drainboard that holds a removable cutting board. The custom pedestal table at the dining booth conceals power outlets for laptops and other personal electronic devices.

Courtesy Bates Masi + Architects

A linear skylight illuminates the travertine-lined cooking reces… Read More A linear skylight illuminates the travertine-lined cooking recess.

Courtesy Bates Masi + Architects

… Read More The master bedroom’s built-in headboard repeats the fireplace’s slatted pattern, but in leather instead of bronze.

Courtesy Bates Masi + Architects

A custom light fixture fabricated with bead chain echoes a panel… Read More A custom light fixture fabricated with bead chain echoes a panel of narrow vertical wall tile at the master bath’s tub.

Courtesy Bates Masi + Architects

Designed to look like a detached fragment of the main building, … Read More Designed to look like a detached fragment of the main building, the pool house doubles as a guest suite.

Courtesy Bates Masi + Architects

Courses of lapped travertine tiles below the end-wall windows co… Read More Courses of lapped travertine tiles below the end-wall windows contrast with the building’s flush mahogany siding.

Every custom home responds to a client’s unique program; that’s what makes it custom. But Sam’s Creek began with an unusual combination of requirements. Its owners, the parents of two young children, also are a classic New York power couple. He’s in finance; she runs a 60-person PR agency. “She’s really a multitasker,” says architect Paul Masi. “They have parties of 20 children and entertain 30 adults at the same time, some of whom are clients.” To help manage their overlapping family and professional lives, Masi and his partner Harry Bates designed the new house as a grouping of connected pavilions, each serving a specific set of functions.

“They’re almost like separate buildings,” says Masi of the open-ended “boxes” that make up the building. “There’s a connection between them, but they’re allowed to be separate.” Oriented toward the north and south—and screening out neighboring houses at the east and west—the interlocking volumes open onto sheltered courtyards and hedge-bordered lawns. Despite a relatively tight neighborhood location, Masi says, “you’re really just looking out into the landscape.”

A high, glass-walled living and dining pavilion stands at the center of the composition, linking the kitchen and family room to the east, and family bedrooms to the west. A transparent gateway between the formal entrance and the main patio, the central pavilion accommodates large gatherings that flow comfortably onto the main patio and into the kitchen without disturbing the house’s more private zones. A pair of two-bedroom guest quarters, at opposite ends of the house, mirror each other’s compact floor plan. The pool house, conceived as a detached “fragment” of the main house, serves as a fifth guest suite. “There’s definitely an efficiency we were trying to achieve, keeping the house as small as possible with this number of bedrooms,” Masi says.

An abbreviated palette of rich materials unifies the loose-jointed floor plan. Mahogany exterior siding wraps into the house, where it covers walls, floors, and ceilings. Travertine pavers form an unbroken plane from the entrance walk, across the living room floor, and into the backyard hardscape. “To keep the number of materials down, we even carved the stone to make grills in the floor,” says Masi, referring to the HVAC. His firm also designed the house’s interiors. The resulting integration of architecture and furnishings reflects the architects’ goal of “letting it be about the geometry rather than about the materials.”

Where a material moves to the foreground, it does so with authority. The fireplace that divides the living and dining room, a steel-framed structure clad in slatted bronze plates, asserts a strongly sculptural presence. Builder Stephen Breitenbach points out that the assembly also conceals mechanical equipment, a coat closet, and a structural moment frame that provides rigidity to the entire pavilion. Rather than gas jets, the hearth holds a troughlike alcohol burner set in a bed of brass BBs. “That’s a flueless fireplace,” Breitenbach says. The hood above leads to a skylight, he explains, so instead of smoke wafting up, “during the daytime, light comes down that shaft over the fireplace.”

The kitchen works a similar trick, with a rooftop monitor that pours light into a recessed counter area lined with travertine. The back wall of the recess borrows its lapped pattern from the building’s exterior, where the same detail—also in travertine—accents the window walls. “We had special stainless steel wire clips fabricated for that,” Breitenbach says. Elsewhere, the room draws from the house’s core palette, with hinged mahogany panels concealing the refrigerator, storage cabinets, and a wood-burning brick pizza oven. The consistency of materials “gives the kitchen the sense of being another entertaining space,” Masi says.

But every party ends eventually, so the house reserves a few visual treats for its owners alone. The master bedroom centers on a built-in bed whose high headboard repeats the fireplace’s cladding pattern, but in leather rather than bronze. The master bath’s focal point is a vessel tub, bracketed by the room’s etched glass shower and toilet enclosures and backed by a panel of narrow ceramic tiles. The custom light fixture above, with its dangling curtain of bead chain, echoes the tiles’ rainlike pattern. “It has the same effect as water,” Masi says.