East End Compound

On one of the last great open expanses of Long Island’s East End, a family assembled three parcels—two buildable lots and an adjoining forty-four-acre agricultural reserve—to shape a retreat from a former farmstead. On the interior parcel, a new house, guest house, pool house, and tennis court were designed in the spirit of early-20th-century Shingle-style architecture. Working closely with John B. Murray, Architects and Victoria Hagan Interiors, RBLA led the master plan for this lot and for the remaining house parcel and meadow, conceiving a landscape that gives the house a sense of precinct without severing its bond to the horizon. Drawing on Olmsted’s estate work with early Shingle-style architects, the design weaves ordered walls and paving with pastoral threads drawing the eye toward the meadow. From the arrival court, a curving walk sweeps to the front porch and then on to a pine-flanked threshold to the meadow beyond. A low stone wall gathers the landscape at the rear and sides of the house, openings aligned to glazed doors and porches. Paths, garden rooms and terraces  are arrayed along its length, corresponding to interior spaces of the house, incorporating custom planters and an antique wellhead.

Specimen trees, chosen for sculptural presence, anchor key outlooks within and beyond the garden walls. Moving towards the fields, arcs of lawn dissolve into a restored meadow of native grasses.