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"View Slideshow\n\nWe understand the language of the American Shingle Style house because we have done so many of them,\" says architect Robert A. M. Stern. Among his most recently completed is a 12-room main house with a six-room guesthouse on a four-acre site in Southampton, New York, designed for a developer, his wife and three children. Done in collaboration with partner Randy Correll and comprising 10,000 square feet, it is one of the firm's larger residential commissions.\n\nHow did the architects go about it? \"When Randy and I work together, or when I work with any of my other design partners, we go through lots of books,\" Stern explains. \"We have a big library in the office, and the fun is in rediscovering old friends among buildings and seeing new things and being inspired. I think architecture is a very scholarly pursuit; it always was, historically.\" But Stern's team doesn't just look at books. \"In real life we do little pilgrimages, we snoop, we take photographs from the road of houses we can't get into, and so we have learned to think in a given tradition or vernacular.\"\n\nThe more modest arrangements in plan and elevation give this big house a friendlier, more domestic character.\n\nAccording to Stern, the Southampton house is a fusion of Shingle Style themes without reference to any specific historic house. In plan, the two structures possess a formal order within which the rooms are symmetrical but arranged asymmetrically, contributing to the compositional interest of the fa\u00E7ades. Many Shingle Style houses are accretions of separate wings added over time to original, small farmhouses. In homage to this tradition, Stern and Correll designed the library in the main house as a distinct wing in the form of just such an early rural Colonial dwelling, and the kitchen wing is like a little farmhouse itself. These more modest arrangements in plan and elevation give this big house a friendlier, more domestic character. Stern believes that such historically based architectural gestures do even more than that. \"Houses should be dream scenarios. What could be more fun than wandering around as a child might, in a house that has neat nooks and crannies, or to walk around outside and imagine that it grew over time like a castle in England.\"\n\nThe interior design of both houses is the work of Mariette Himes Gomez. \"Mariette's d\u00E9cor is perfect\u2014the result of a happy collaboration with Randy and me,\" says Stern. \"She keeps the colors subtle, and she has what I call an editorial eye; she strips things down. She can take a tangled set of decorative impulses and simplify them. She also does what we do when she begins with traditional shapes and adjusts and reimagines them in a contemporary space for contemporary use. She knows how to place rather nice old things in new contexts.\"\n\n\"The clients own major art,\" explains Gomez. \"The background for my work was to create a setting for the objects that they chose to put in these houses.\" And she knows when to leave a space almost unadorned by such objects, as in the high-ceilinged rectangular entrance hall at the center of the main house. This hall opens onto the two primary rooms as well as to the lawn and gardens beyond. A grand double doorway in the south wall offers a tantalizing glimpse of the furniture and art assembled in the living room. On the north wall, a similar double doorway near the bottom of the staircase provides an eyeful of the splendid English table and Windsor chairs in the dining room and the chandelier Gomez designed to go with them.\n\nThe beauty of the entrance hall is the gift of its classical form, generous proportions, the elaborately carved crown moldings above the doorways, the simply patterned wainscoting and the elegance of the stair handrail and balusters. Says Gomez, \"I thought this hall was such a splendid architectural element\u2014brightened by its views into the living room, dining room and outdoors\u2014that it didn't really call for anything much to be added.\" Among the few pieces she placed in the space is a sculpture by the staircase, the work of Tom Otterness, titled Covered Wagon.\n\nThe living room can also be entered through a door leading from the adjacent pergola, doors that emerge through the fireplace wall from opposite ends of the porch, and via a gallery space that connects the living room to the library. Although these large openings on three of the four walls give this room a sense of connection to the neighboring rooms and to the outdoors, it was a design challenge to keep the furniture out of the way of the grid of interior pathways. Gomez arranged the sofa and a pair of love seats, the pair of tub chairs and a selection of light and graceful side tables, as well as a couple of low tables and other items, into three separate conversation groups to keep these circulation routes clear. The focus of the room is the handsome bay window overlooking the lawn and gardens. Gomez is quite proud of the French carved-wood-and-cane bench (circa 1920) she positioned there. \"I saw this marvelous object and knew just where it should go,\" she happily recalls.\n\nThe Palladian window, obligatory for all Shingle Style houses, is centered in the master bedroom. \"This window is such a beautiful terminus to the room, but it was almost impossible for me to do,\" Gomez remembers. \"Tieback curtains are not my normal moment, and I believe in very little at windows. Nevertheless, I thought that, if the clients actually needed to sleep in the daytime, because of jet lag or whatever, we had to find a way to close the daylight off. I think what we did is simple, nicely scaled and appropriate.\"\n\nStern concludes, \"Her effort fits what we tried to do with the architecture of the two houses, which is to design straightforwardly and simply and then add a few rhetorical gestures. Where she found a place for a beautiful French bench from the 1920s, we saw the chance to do an elaborate entrance terrace for the main house with a decorative frieze above. The rest consists of nice proportions and nice detail, but not detail that jumps out at you\u2014it's not over the top and is as much about a classical interpretation of the Shingle Style as it is about a very good way of building.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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