Myron Henry Goldfinger, in his 1984 Conason House in Southampton, set out to dominate the landscape with what seems a giant machine of pistons and engines and levers. But Mark Simon, in the 1984 Crowell Studio in Quogue, had caught the postmodernist fever for pastiche, and he mixed and matched what amounted to a Victorian cupola with two boardwalk wings. When Steven Spielberg settled in on the shore of East Hampton's Georgica Pond in the early '80s, he asked Charles Gwathmey to design a contemporary house with the look and feel of a barn. The zinc roof of the guesthouse curves like a bridge, though inside, the atmosphere is rural. As architectural statements have replaced potatoes in the fields, and the Hamptons edge toward the glossy end of suburbanism, increasingly new houses are nostalgic for the simpler times they have replaced.
Details look back for inspiration and a sense of place.
It is different on the North Fork, where rural traditions are still the stuff of daily life and farm stands and vineyards are replacing the potato fields. There the money has never been big, and architectural ambitions have been so conservative and so modest that a house that dares the sculptural forms of modernism becomes the stuff of disapproving village gossip. But it is in that traditional ground that a new house bursts from a potato field with the protean vitality that made the Gwathmey house a messenger from the future in the '60s. The house that Hideaki Ariizumi and Glynis Berry have built for themselves at the eastern edge of Southold Town is as layered as a mountain view in a Chinese scroll painting, as eccentrically assembled as a Japanese village. The angles of the exterior towers are in contradictory dialogue, particularly as some are clad in aluminum that reflects the light and some in cedar shakes that swallow it.