Wanting round clothier Derek Lam’s waterfront house, one would not instantly consider sipping sake.
However that was key to the inspiration he shared with architect and inside designer Neal Beckstedt once they started engaged on this mission collectively. In fact, Derek Lam being Derek Lam—a womenswear star recognized for combining elegant simplicity and beautiful detailing—this wasn’t simply any sake.
“To start with, I advised Neal that my favourite drink was this sake at [the New York City restaurant] Omen that they serve in a cedar field. It is completely easy, and it has this lovely cedar scent whenever you drink it,” Lam remembers. “I stated, ‘Neal, I simply wish to dwell inside that sake field.’”
Ask and sure shall obtain.
Now, Lam lives within the cedar sake field of his goals. Collectively along with his husband, Jan-Hendrik Schlottmann, founding father of Italian trend model Callas Milano, and their Irish terrier, Roscoe, he is made the many of the serene house’s 2,000 sq. toes of minimalist, modernist house—all of it fairly extra comfy and comfy than it might need been due to Beckstedt’s rigorously thought-out use of heat, pure supplies and sculptural accents.
“Derek all the time involves the desk with a bit of binder of curated imagery,” Beckstedt says. Lam initially commissioned Russell Groves’s workplace on the design, the place Beckstedt labored on the house as its principal designer. He then continued main the mission after branching out on his personal and founding his namesake agency. “On this case,” Beckstedt continues, talking of Lam, “he got here with pictures of some very minimal, very wood-driven fashionable houses.”
These touchstones suited the setting to a T. Lam and Schlottmann had bought a home amid the treetopped sand dunes of Fireplace Island’s Pines district, a storied LGBTQ+ summer time enclave in New York, freed from automobiles and filled with wildlife. It is also house to one of the spectacular collections of wood-clad fashionable residences within the nation. And the couple hadn’t bought simply any home, both, however one designed by midcentury grasp Horace Gifford, the architect behind among the space’s finest buildings.
With its Gifford pedigree and its sturdy, H-shaped elevation—outlined by tall vertical volumes flanking a decrease central pavilion—the home had a lot to suggest it. However it additionally posed appreciable challenges. It was petite, initially conceived as a bed room bungalow for a bigger house subsequent door. And it was all however falling aside.
And but, “The minute we walked into the home, even earlier than I knew it was Horace Gifford, I bear in mind simply form of falling in love with the form and the compactness, the thoughtfulness of the house,” Lam says. “The shape was actually charming, superbly formed. One thing about it actually felt prefer it wasn’t the standard seaside home. It was designed with one thing in thoughts, with lovely intention.”
The objective of Beckstedt’s redesign, then, grew to become to honor that unique intention whereas additionally increasing upon it, each actually and figuratively. The home grew in dimension, however nearly imperceptibly—“I used to be actually reacting to Gifford’s geometry,” the designer says—so it will sit calmly on its parcel of land.
