Bounded by an Atlantic beach and a freshwater pond, Sagaponack House’s site gave architect Paul Masi almost too much view to work with. But wetlands and coastal setbacks left only a sliver of buildable land, so rather than compose the building in additive fashion, he worked in reverse. After establishing a form that defined the entire buildable envelope, he says, “we started carving away at the mass … sculpting out these openings that would connect the ocean and the pond—and make the house feel like a pavilion at times.”

The entryway, a two-story slot through the building’s barlike form, frames a layer-cake view of land, sea, and sky. Nesting lift-slide doors create a pond-to-beach flyway, turning the master suite into a treehouselike platform over the living and family rooms. The kitchen and dining room, whose ocean-facing wall similarly disappears, are only slightly more enclosed. Operable walls open other spaces to the beach, the pond, or both.

Masi balances the house’s broad-stroke bravura with a deft control of material and surface texture. Cedar-strip siding panels—bracketed by rusted steel end walls—lend a fine-grained precision to a building whose sheer size might otherwise overwhelm. As one judge observed, “you go deeper and deeper, and you find more inspiring details.” But the house works equally well at every level of scale. “The voids, the flow, the program … I love it,” said another judge. “I’d live in that house in a heartbeat.”

On Site

Cor-Ten steel at the roof edge and end walls frames the house’s cedar-clad exterior. To avoid rust stains, drainage channels direct runoff away from the adjacent wood surfaces. The landscape wall at the house’s entry side consists of Cor-Ten plates that were waterjet-cut in a picket-fence pattern and placed via crane.