#Charles Gwathmey

[germanpostwarmodern]

Viereck Residence (1979) in Amagansett, NY, USA, by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates. Photo by Scott Frances.

[pointandshooter]

Glenstone Museum, Travilah, Maryland

design Charles Gwathmey (1938−2009)

photo: David Castenson

[vintagehomecollection]

Unusual custom-designed fixtures, including a contoured platform for ‘sunbathing,’ help give this bathroom its look of luxury. Charles Gwathmey, architect.

Inside Today’s Home, 1986

[grey-gardens]

https://www.veranda.com/decorating-ideas/house-tours/a42045998/grey-gardens-home-tour/

Inside Liz Lange's Glamorous Restoration of Grey Gardens

The fashion entrepreneur has restored the East Hampton landmark with bold confidence, singular style, and a little swagger.

STEELE THOMAS MARCOUX PUBLISHED: DEC 15

Liz Lange does not believe in ghosts. In fact, she’s dismissive when asked whether Grey Gardens, the 1901 East Hampton, New York, estate she and her husband recently restored, is haunted. “I didn’t expect to see ghosts because I simply don’t believe in them,” the creative director and chief executive officer of women’s luxury fashion and lifestyle brand Figue says of what it felt like to move in.

Which isn’t to say the past is not present at Grey Gardens. Shortly after purchasing the home in late 2017, the fashion entrepreneur embarked on an extensive restoration of the storied estate, working with architecture firms Ferguson & Shamamian and Bories & Shearron to modernize the operation of the house while preserving much of its original design.

This involved digging a full basement to conceal contemporary mechanical and other functional spaces, shoring up the home’s foundation and structure, protecting original elements like the Dutch front door and foyer banisters during construction for restoration and, when needed, reconstruction, and adding back period-appropriate details like diamond-paned windows and doors with restoration glass—all while leaving the house’s footprint and exterior design nearly unchanged. “Liz and her husband knew that the architectural background they wanted to live in was the one that was built in 1901,” says architect Mark Ferguson, whose firm oversaw the restoration.

Plans for the original house—an L-shaped, shingle-clad structure with dramatic gabled rooflines and brick chimneys, faint echoes of the English Arts and Crafts vernacular that seeded the American Shingle Style—were designed by architect Joseph Greenleaf Thorpe and commissioned by Fleming Stanhope Phillips. But Phillips died before his vision was realized. Instead his wife, Margaret Bagg Phillips, who famously inherited his estate after fending off challenges to the will from Phillips’s brother, built the house later that year.

To summon the spirit of the original house, Lange changed its flow as little as possible. While some minor floor plan reconfigurations were necessary for the house to live at today’s standards—opening the kitchen to a breakfast room, adding a back stairwell—other alterations, like punching out attic dormer windows on the street side, were avoided to retain the integrity of the original building. Says Lange: “One of the reasons it still feels like an old house is that we forced ourselves not to make it perfect perfect. The floors still creak a little bit, and they are not entirely level.”

The thoughtful revival of its gardens is but another invocation of the property’s past. Lange worked with landscape architect Deborah Nevins on a thorough overhaul of the grounds, planting new gardens in some places and restoring historic elements in others, and facilitating as much outdoor living as possible. Most notably Nevins restored the walled garden, pergola, and thatched garden hut, which had been added by prominent horticulturalist and author Anna Gilman Hill, the second owner of Grey Gardens (from 1913 to 1924) and the first to describe it as such. When reflecting on the garden spaces, Lange describes a distinctive magic. “There’s almost a quietness and you feel like you don’t even know where you are. It has this strangely magical, peaceful, beautiful atmosphere.”

Perhaps ironically Lange’s family history in East Hampton—childhood summers and weekends spent in a rigorously modern house by architect Charles Gwathmey—fueled her passion for Grey Gardens in the first place. “I loved it,” she says of her parents’ home, “but it was not lost on me that the other houses on the street were these older houses…often Shingle Style cottages built at the turn of the 20th century with mature properties and older trees. I grew to think that I wanted a house like that when I had my own.”

It was her love of the house, not its provenance, Lange insists, that prompted her to buy when it came up for sale. She and her husband had rented the house for a summer several years prior and had become smitten with its details, proportions, layout, and gardens. “The landscape struck me as familiar,” she says. “The flow of the rooms just made sense, and it has a really cozy feel, and it’s a very bright house. I worried about it feeling dark, maybe in that haunted way although I don’t believe it’s haunted, but it doesn’t. It’s a very sunshine-y, happy house.”

Lange, who hails from a family who experienced very public financial booms and busts (as she chronicles in The Just Enough Family, her podcast with friend and journalist Ariel Levy) and who became a household name at a relatively early stage in her career with the success of her eponymous maternity brand, is the sixth in a string of prominent, artistic, even visionary women to inhabit the house, each casting a reflection of herself within its design. She bought it from author Sally Quinn, who, along with husband and Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, brought the house back from its near-condemned state, restored many period pieces that came with it, and summered there for more than 30 years, hosting legendary parties with star-studded guest lists until Bradlee passed away in 2014.

The Washington power couple had purchased the estate in 1979 from Edith Bouvier Beale. “Little Edie” lived with her mother, Edith “Big Edie” Ewing Bouvier Beale, at Grey Gardens from the early 1950s until the elder Edie’s death, both in increasing isolation and squalor as they ran out of money to maintain the estate. The juxtaposition of their flamboyant personalities with their decaying, animal-infested environment was exposed in the 1975 cult-classic documentary film Grey Gardens—and has been memorialized many times over in other films, books, and even a 2006 Broadway musical.

Today the interiors of Grey Gardens are a far cry from dereliction—or even the gently worn summer cottage aesthetic one might expect to find inside a century-old shingled seaside home. Instead different essences of femininity filter throughout: A dreamy, romantic spirit pervades the bedrooms; the kitchen, breakfast room, and pool and tennis cabana effuse a bohemian, almost exotic élan; and the wild foyer, sultry dining room, and groovy living room radiate an irresistible gusto not all that dissimilar from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s style celebrated to enthralling effect on Lange’s Instagram feed.

It’s a singular mirroring of Lange’s persona and the result of her collaboration with designer Mark D. Sikes, artists and artisans from around the world, and close friend and designer Jonathan Adler, who helped her add a layer of glamour to the living spaces on the first floor. “It’s a lot to live up to, such a famous house, so the decorating had to be bold and original,” says Adler. “Liz has always embodied a true idiosyncratic style with swagger. You can see it in the way she lives and in [her creative direction of] Figue,” which has launched a line of tableware under Lange’s lead.

Of course, idiosyncratic style has permeated the house from the beginning. “A lot of Shingle Style is a reinvention of something else. It’s a vehicle for dabbling in eccentricities,” notes architect James Shearron. “How wonderful that Grey Gardens fell into the hands of someone who has the same kind of spirit as its most famous owner.”

Even with a thoroughly reimagined point of view, the house is not entirely exorcised of the Edies’ presence. Lange tasked a handful of artists with interpreting their spirit: In the foyer, a painting of Little Edie in a headscarf by Helen Downing offers a charismatic greeting, while the second-story landing features papier-mâché busts of Big and Little Edie by artist Mark Gagnon; illustrations of the pair by Jason O’Malley float above a guest room headboard. The works represent “a wink or nod to the former owners,” says Lange—or ghosts, perhaps, of her own making.

Featured in our January/February 2023 issue. Interior Design by Jonathan Adler and Mark D. Sikes; Architecture by Bories & Shearron Architecture and Ferguson & Shamamian; Landscape Design by Deborah Nevins; Photography by Pascal Chevallier; Styling by Hilary Robertson; Produced by Cynthia Frank and Brad Comisar; Florals by The Bridgehampton Florist; Written by Steele Thomas Marcoux

[worldsandemanations]

The son of a photographer mother and a painter father, Charles Gwathmey studied architecture at Yale. 1965 house he built for his parents near the water in Amagansett.

[jkdanu]

Charles Gwathmey-Designed Modernist Barn Turned Home Is Listed in Greenwich, CT, for $4.8M

http://dlvr.it/T8Y3FK

[gcmyers]

"I Just Quit"/ Rosalie Gwathmey

Rosalie Gwathmey- Deep South I was doing a little research on the painter Robert Gwathmey, the social realist painter (1903-1988) whose work most often depicted the day-to-day life of poor African American culture of the American South in the first half of the 20th century. I knew that his son, Charles Gwathmey, was a famous and influential architect but I didn’t know much about his wife,…

[filingfillets]

Charles Gwathmey / Sedacca Residence / 1967 / New York, US

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source:

photo by: Bill Maris

https://www.gwathmey-siegel.com/2013/08/sedacca-residence/

[germanpostwarmodern]

The career of Charles Gwathmey started with a house, even before he was a licensed architect: in 1965 he realized a studio/house for his parents, painter Robert and photographer Rosalie Gwathmey, in Amagensett, NY, that won the Yale graduate wide recognition and even appeared as an example on his licensing exam. Gwathmey had spent the years after his graduation in 1962 first in Paris with Candilis Josic Woods and then in New York with George Nemeny Architects as well as Edward Larrabee Barnes until he went into partnership with Richard Henderson. In 1968 Robert Siegel joined the partnership that in 1970 became Gwathmey Siegel & Associates after the departure of Henderson.

For Gwathmey the house always remained the point of departure for all other building types and accordingly it also occupied a central position in his oeuvre, even though prestigious projects like the 1992 addition to Frank Lloyd Wright’s New York Guggenheim Museum or the Morgan Stanley Building also in New York added a whole different dimension to his firm’s commissions.

In 2000 Monacelli Press published „Gwathmey Siegel Houses“, a comprehensive monograph presenting 22 houses and residences realized between 1965 and 1993. What immediately strikes the eye is Gwathmey’s preference for basic geometric figures that he obviously shared with another architect of the „New York Five“, namely Richard Meier. But in contrast to the latter Gwathmey experimented with different materials, textures and thus colors that gave his designs a greater degree of variety. These characteristics can be studied in great detail in the book as each project is presented in extensive photo spreads as well as plans and sections, features that aren’t too common in large-size coffee table books like the present one undoubtedly is.

[lionfloss]

Gwathmey // Siegel de Menil Residence

[manila-automat]

Inside Architecture, 1996  Charles Gwathmey’s New York apartment

[blueiscoool]

The Modern House in the Dunes

Charles Gwathmey was an influential architect for many decades in the 1900s, so when one of his works showed up in need of renovation in Amagansett, New York, architecture and design studio Worrell Yeung enthusiastically jumped on board.

The home, originally known as the Haupt Residence, was constructed in the 1970s and has remained unchanged, standing as an example of Gwathmey’s work. The team at Worrell Yeung approached the project with reverence. Max Worrell, co-founder of Worrell Yeung said, “We’re big fans of Gwathmey – particularly his early stuff. So we were very excited when we got the call about the house. Especially given that it was in its original condition, totally untouched.” He continued, “Our intention, at first, was really to do as little as possible.”

While the result was a full renovation of the exterior and some changes to the inside, restoration was really at the forefront of the theme. Worrell says they had the original drawings to work from, so they made gradual changes while trying to maintain the original design. Worrell says, “At every stage of the process we were asking ourselves, ‘What would Gwathmey do?’”

The team had good bones to work within the four-bedroom home dubbed House in the Dunes. It sits on an acre of land with surrounding views of dunes and the ocean.

The outside reflects the coastal vibe with gray cedar cladding, but it was showing the wear of the years so the team preserved the essence of the original design while bringing a modern appeal in a new roof, cedar siding, doors and windows, skylights, and pool deck.

The inside benefits from the natural light streaming in through doors and windows. These openings also connect the indoors and the outdoors, allowing the owners to seamlessly move from the living space to the pool to the ocean beyond. To achieve this flow, Worrell Yeung made a small but impactful design change by removing a half wall between the living room and kitchen.

With relatively small structural changes, the Worrell Yeung team moved onto interior design with respect to Gwathmey’s original designs, replacing white pine trim and matching the original kitchen laminate.

By Dawn Hammon.

Photography by Naho Kubota

[danismm]

The Gwathmey Residence and Studio in Amagansett, NY 1965. Arch. Charles Gwathmey.

[worldsandemanations]

Yale-trained architect Charles Gwathmey designed the Cooper Residence in 1967

[archiveofaffinities]

Charles Gwathmey and Richard Henderson, Suburban House, Purchase, New York, 1968

[ofhouses]

709. Charles Gwathmey & Robert Siegel /// Lloyd Taft House /// Cincinnati, Ohio, USA /// 1978-80

OfHouses presents Record Houses, part XI. (Photos: © Richard Payne, Yukio Futagawa. Source: “Architectural Record Houses of 1981″, Mid-May 1981; GA Houses 13/1983.)