East Hampton Modern: Shou Sugi Ban Gables Shape a Coastal Hideaway
East Hampton Modern stands on a pastoral property in East Hampton, NY, United States, where Workshop/APD rethinks the classic weekend house for city dwellers. The 2021 project arranges crisp gabled volumes around a pool and meadow, setting up a clear dialogue between social life, guest privacy, and the open landscape. Inside and out, the house reads as a retreat planned around movement, light, and long poolside days with visiting friends.
A dark, gabled silhouette sits against a bright meadow, its shou sugi ban cladding catching light along sharp rooflines and shadows. From the pool deck, the arrangement reads clearly: one wing for everyday living and the primary suite, another for guests, bridged by a covered outdoor corridor.
This is a house planned as a weekend destination, not a suburban default. On a bucolic East Hampton property beside a multi-acre horse farm, Workshop/APD organizes the volumes as a series of purposeful wings around water and grass, so movement between rooms always brushes past the outdoors. The result centers on sequence, using the route from car to pool, and from primary suite to guest quarters, to choreograph how city-based owners and visitors inhabit the property.
Approach And Threshold
Arrival moves from landscape to architecture in deliberate steps. A visitor crosses the rural property, with the horse farm stretching beyond, before the black timber gables come into full view. The covered exterior corridor becomes the key threshold, holding back interior life for a moment while keeping the pool and meadow in constant sight, so every transition passes through filtered light and open air.
Living Wing By The Pool
One side of the corridor holds the primary suite and an open plan living room, dining room, and kitchen, planned as a continuous social core. Long sightlines run along the gabled volume toward the extraordinary pool, so time spent cooking or reading always retains a visual tether to the water. The primary suite tucks into this wing, giving the owners easy, almost direct access to the pool terrace while maintaining a degree of quiet away from guest circulation.
Guest Suites Across The Court
Across the covered corridor, two private guest suites sit in their own volume, forming a counterpart to the main living wing. Each room faces the same central pool and meadow, so every guest shares the principal outlook even while sleeping and bathing in a more secluded zone. The arrangement grants visitors independence—morning swims and late evenings become possible without crossing through the owners’ rooms, which suits a rotating cast of friends from New York.
Pool, Meadow, And Edge
At the heart of the plan, the pool reads almost like an outdoor living room, with three sides wrapped by meadow and one side anchored by the black gables. The grassy perimeter softens the pool’s edge, giving swimmers long, low views into the landscape instead of hard fencing or dense planting. That simple relationship between water and field turns an everyday courtyard idea into something more relaxed, calibrated to the rural context and the horse farm beyond.
In 2024, this careful orchestration of movement and outlook earned the house Best Weekend Home in the Interior Design NYCxDESIGN Awards and an Exterior Architecture award in the Luxe RED Awards. On quiet Fridays and crowded summer weekends alike, daily life revolves around walking that covered path, sliding open doors, and stepping out toward the pool as the meadow wraps the property in shifting light.
Photography courtesy of Workshop/APD
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