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.
Light is the poetic theme indoors, but so is a delicious sense of play.
There is no reason at all why the free-floating portal over the door that perfectly frames a view of an old red truck in a field should end where it does, except that it simply seems right. The risers on steps at the side of the two-story living room open like chests, windows are where they are least expected. Ariizumi and Berry's next assignment is an addition to a typical modernist house on the South Fork. By now, both the cubes of modernism and the historical yearnings of post-modernism have become tradition there and are ready for an update.