Beach Happy

As the summer escape of well-heeled New Yorkers, The Hamptons is known for sprawling mansions as much as it is quaint historic clapboard cottages. This 1960s beach house, recently renovated by Brooklyn-based General Assembly, is neither of those, yet it still has a strong sense of place: humble yet highly articulate, it takes the vernacular architecture of the traditional cedar-shingled homes of the area and elevates it into a place with a beautifully crafted feel.

Sarah Zames and Colin Stief, General Assembly’s co-founders, were inspired by the work of architect Norman Jaffe, who moved to the area in the early 1970s and pursued a singular vision of Hamptons modernism, blending rustic, vernacular materials (such as shingles) with angular, sculptural volumes. But the attention to materials and craftsmanship – and the holistic approach that looks at architecture, interiors and custom details in the round – is all theirs.

Sited in the hamlet of Amagansett, the 130 sqm house is a retreat for Manhattan-based couple Stuart Matz, an artist and creative director, and Jeannie Kim, a jeweller. “For the Hamptons it is incredibly humble; I think it was always meant as a little escape,” says Zames. “But at some point it had had a bad flip, and the charm was gone.” Local planning rules specified that it would not be possible to extend, so Zames and Stief had to work with what they had, focusing on reconfiguration to suit the couple’s lifestyle.

Downstairs, two bedrooms are now one bedroom and an expanded bathroom and kitchen, with the whole ground floor opened up for better flow. “A lot of [the thinking behind] this project came from the fact that it’s just the two of them and their dogs most of the time,” says Zames. “It really feels like one space is open to the other throughout.” Norman Jaffe’s technique of carving out volumes influenced the transformation of what was once a narrow space into a dramatic double-height, skylit jewellery studio for Kim, while upstairs, an en-suite bathroom has been added to the existing bedroom.

The house’s sense of modesty has been retained through its palette of materials. “All the materials feel solid, and have a natural variation to them, such as the handmade tile and the wood,” says Stief. “They’re materials that just feel alive, or where you can tell that they were made by hand. They’re just very honest.”

In the kitchen, high-gloss dark green floor tiles meet oak cabinetry, with a stainless steel island: this simple elegance is also highly practical, able to handle sand being tracked in from the beach just down the road. The house’s colours draw on the natural world outside the door: sand, pine trees and earthy brown and terracotta.

The bathroom is one of the house’s standout moments, with its sunken stainless steel bath (complete with a little eye-level window on to the outside deck) cocooned in greenish-yellow tiles from California’s Heath Ceramics, stacked in a pattern of fours and twos like matte bars of 1970s soap.

The tiling wraps over a low wall to the adjacent semi-open shower, while the custom-designed timber basin vanity has curves that counteract the potentially tight squeeze to access the bath. A line of oak trim runs around the room, capping the top course of tiles – a linking thread from the picture rail in the living room, used as a device to visually unite all the ground-floor rooms.

Stief’s background in furniture and product design comes to the fore in the joinery and its details, like the neat kitchen cabinetry handles, inspired by a nautical cleat. A playful pierced timber screen motif appears in several locations, including infilling an awkward space under the eaves in the first-floor bedroom where it overlooks Kim’s studio below, casting beautiful shadows. General Assembly has its own line of furniture, and its Hewn coffee table, a kidney-shaped piece with visible joints in contrasting timber, sits at the centre of the living room.

In the dining area – a continuation of the kitchen, with the same glossy green tiles – Ingo Maurer’s late-1960s Tricena pendant hangs above a stone-topped round table designed by a friend of Matz and Kim’s, perfectly matched to Fort Standard’s Shaker-inspired Range dining chairs.

Stief says that the house has become more than just a summer weekend bolthole for the homeowners: “They love being here, and try to spend as much time as possible here. Even in the winter, it’s very cosy.” And Zames confides that “it’s one of our favourite projects we’ve ever done,” proof that it’s much more about quality of space than it is quantity. “With the way that the architecture and interiors come together, this project is a really good example of what we do best,” she says. “It just feels really cohesive.”