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"View Slideshow\n\nSome people call Shelter Island, New York, which is just a nine-minute ferry ride from Long Island's glamorous South Fork, the Unhampton. But architectural designer and interior decorator Russell Piccione isn't one of them. When it comes to this idyllic destination of resort cottages and nature preserves, he prefers to focus not on what it isn't but on what it is\u2014namely, he says, \"understated and low-key.\" Those are the same words he uses to describe the two-story waterfront getaway he crafted there for a Connecticut couple and their young children, in Dering Harbor, a historic village on the north side of the island. \"It's refined but not flashy,\" he observes, \"a place in which you can feel at home.\"\n\n Piccione, who is based in New York City, began the project in 2007 with a pair of givens. The first was that the seven-acre site's 1960s saltbox, where the clients had summered for more than a decade, was to be incorporated into a bigger, more comfortable residence with room for extended family. The second given was the community's strict architectural guidelines, which have preserved its visual harmony.\n\n \"Dering Harbor has a beautiful collection of houses,\" Piccione explains, \"and I found it important to think I was contributing to an ensemble. A house here is expected to look Colonial, be covered in white-painted clapboard, and stand no more than 35 feet tall.\" But there was a problem. Wrapping an 18th-century-style skin around a large contemporary structure\u2014the family wanted ten bedrooms\u2014would have resulted in a much too imposing building. Fine for a hall in Harvard Yard, perhaps, but out of place in a deliberately quiet corner of a famously restrained isle.\n\n The answer, the designer decided, was not less Georgian, but more\u2014or at least more Georges, which would give the dwelling a compelling narrative sweep. Now it looks as if it were constructed in stages, over several generations, as a family grew along with its fortunes. Distinguished by a grand bay window, a new wing containing the dining room reflects the vocabulary of the mid-18th century, when George II sat on the English throne. The center section, which includes the original saltbox, references neoclassicism under George III. And the bedroom wing, sporting a prominent pediment, is Greek Revival, a mode popular during the time of George IV\u2014fervently so along the Eastern Seaboard. To all but the trained eye, these distinctions are noticed only subliminally, as Piccione intended.\n\n \"It's nice to have the decorator and architectural designer in one,\" says the husband, noting that Piccione brought evocative period accents inside the house as well. Consider the two sets of neoclassical double doors in the entrance hall, one pair opening into the living room, the other into the kitchen. They were designed around 1770 by the brilliant architect Robert Adam for the London residence of David Garrick, the most celebrated actor in 18th-century England. \"Details like those give this place some of its character, solidity, and intellectual credentials,\" says Piccione, who also spiced the decor with a thought-provoking range of cultural artifacts, from Scandinavian to Polynesian.\n\n \"The friend who recommended Russell told us we would learn a lot from him,\" says the husband, who works in finance, \"and that's exactly what happened.\" Among the knowledge imparted is how subtle juxtapositions deepen the relationships between objects. Atop a pedestal in the heart pine\u2013floored living room stands an ancient Greek ceramic pitcher, called an olpe, the sort of classical treasure that inspired Adam. On the opposite side of the space\u2014in the company of a sinuous gilt-wood sofa by Adam collaborator John Linnell and a 1950s Erik Ho\u0308glund hanging candelabra bedecked with pressed-glass disks\u2014Piccione placed a vibrant 1967 Kenneth Noland painting. The items' chronological breadth delights the eye, and, as Piccione points out, the painting's horizontal shape echoes the vista seen through an adjacent window: \"It instantly connects the inside of the house to the outside.\"\n\n Because a home by the water should by all rights embrace its setting, Piccione established several locations for outdoor living. The family frequently dines at a bluestone-top table on a redbrick terrace overlooking the shore. But when raindrops fall, meals are often served on the front porch, at a mahogany table coated with boat lacquer. Links to maritime life crop up inside, too. A table made for Aristotle Onassis's yacht Christina can be found in the living room, while the breakfast area's focus is a huge blue-and-white-tile nautical chart depicting Shelter Island and the East End of Long Island. \"You're never far from the water in this house,\" Piccione says. \"It's all about water\u2014water and light, light and water.\"\n\n Click here to see a slide show of this waterfront getaway on New York's Shelter Island.\n\nView Slideshow"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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