An Open Landscape, Between the Beach and the Bay, Becomes a Family’s Dream Home
When Julie Frist was 12 or 13, her father would take her for driving lessons on a narrow spit of land, not much wider than a football field in places, that separated the flat calm of Long Island’s Shinnecock Bay from the roaring waters of the Atlantic. The quiet road, only partly paved and bordered by scraggly wind-whipped pines, cut a line between the dunes and the marsh, and her father would sit Julie on his lap and let her control the wheel; pebbles would fly up through the holes in the floor of their beat-up station wagon. “Dad, he’s like a secret race car driver,” Julie tells me.
There is no one letting their preteen daughter steer the family beater along these roads now. Houses have sprung up along the formerly empty land overlooking the ocean; traffic is stately but Southampton-steady. When Julie answers the door to her house in a long blue caftan, she’s several decades removed from her youthful driving lessons but light-footed and athletic, tossing me a floppy straw hat as we walk around the property under the blazing sun. A gentle German shepherd named Athena circles her ankles.
Julie spent her girlhood in Washington, DC, before her mother moved her to New York City and then Connecticut, but she and her older brother grew up spending summers in Southampton, where her family has rented or owned property since the late 1960s. “There were no cell phones. You could go out the door at 8 a.m. and bike to the little tennis club and have swim lessons,” Julie says. “And then the parents would barbecue in the backyard, and whoever was around would come by, and then you’d repeat it the next day.” Because she switched school several times, her summer friends were among her closest.
Julie, who had a career in finance, met her husband, Tommy Frist III, at Harvard when they were both in graduate school, and the pair later settled in Nashville (Tommy’s home), where they raised their three now 20-​something children. But the couple started going to Long Island while they were dating, and eventually they bought an old carriage house. They were not looking to move until an unusual and rare property came to their attention: A neglected Le Corbusier–​style white box, worse for wear after years of storms and ocean winds, sat on a scruffy four-​acre lot, with only dunes separating it from the ocean. It was an architectural curiosity, but beyond repair. “You walked in and the smell just knocked you over,” says Julie. “All the humidity, there were mice—it all got trapped in this hot box.” But the site had tremendous potential. Describing it now, Julie summarizes the appeal as a tale of two waterscapes, especially at night. On the bay, you have sunsets, and “twinkly lights and a little bit of a horizon,” she says, “whereas the ocean, unless there’s moonlight, is black.”
The scope for a new house was ambitious, but the aim, at least in concept, was simple: to build something that looked as though it had always been there. “I felt a kind of pressure to honor the houses that I loved growing up in,” says Julie. The Frists turned to the architect Gil Schafer, interior designer David Netto (both of whom had worked on their 1915 Charles Platt house in Nashville), and landscape designer Miranda Brooks. Schafer and Netto were not only old friends with each other, but old friends with Julie and Tommy as well. Netto met Julie, he tells me, in the elevator of a friend’s apartment building in 1985. “There is a picture of me and Julie that night clowning around,” he says. “I had eyeliner on and was trying to get into Area later, and she was this preppy, beautiful girl who had come into the city from Greenwich. We enjoyed each other right away.” Schafer and Tommy had also known each other for decades, and as a young architect, Schafer had worked on Tommy’s parents’ house.
And yet, the family did not want an overly nostalgic or antique sensibility. They all agreed that the house would marry the loose Shingle style popular in the Hamptons in the 1920s and 1930s with the crisp correctness of Colonial Revival—as Schafer puts it: “Life on the beach, but a little bit formal.” But there were disagreements along the way—and a back-and-forth resembling something like a graduate seminar on architectural precedent. “My job was to bring the classic bones,” Schafer says, “and then David was there to kind of loosen me up.” Schafer lost a battle over window proportions in the front of the house; Netto lost a battle to “crank the house in a crescent around the driveway,” even though, as he points out, that was “an old 1920s device to fracture the view.”
And while an empty lot gives an impression of infinite potential, limitations abounded. A perimeter of protected wetland meant that less than an acre was actually suitable for construction. FEMA flooding protections mandated that the house had to be raised, while the town regulations squeezed it from above, limiting how high it could rise. To avoid a flight of stairs leading to the front door, the earth was gently graded.
Brooks took on this topographical project, and figured out a plan that would address the twin challenges of salt winds and deer. “All but the most native of planting would struggle,” Brooks says, “so I gave a lot of attention to the materiality, and the use of a series of quite small outdoor spaces, where you can anchor yourself and follow the sun through the day.” The perimeter was planted with a mix of viburnum, privet, Baccharis, pines, native cherries, red cedar, and Ilex opaca, with espaliered plane trees shielding the garage, and pleached shrubs adding structure near the pool. Between the main living room and a poolside pavilion, there is a kind of outdoor courtyard—an “orchard.” The garden is still young when I visit; the dunes down to the beach have been planted with skinny tufts of beach grass, and Brooks is frank that there may be quite a bit of turnover for the next three or so years—several trees in the orchard have already been replaced—“and then we may settle down into a survival-of-the-fittest situation,” she says. But there is a sense of correct and natural proportion, and yet also surprise and originality. Hydrangeas, those conventional pillars of many a stalwart Long Island hedge, have been confined to great, weathered terra-cotta pots, and rather than the typical “Nikko Blue” clouds, the blooms are white. The most beloved corner of the garden seems to be what everyone now calls “Julie’s Garden,” a small space outside the primary bedroom, shaded by a pergola and intricately seeded with sun-loving perennials like yarrow, echinacea, eryngium, liatris, monarda, asters, and Perovskia, alongside beach plum and white buddleia—a pollinator buffet for lucky bees.
Inside, the house has been filled with love and care (and a kind of storyÂtelling) as well. For the living room, for example, Netto requested that a UK-based manufacturer fabricate an 18th-century, Louis XV–style mantle out of travertine (not limestone, as would have been historically accurate) because he wanted the rougher texture to contribute to the impression that it “had been underwater for 300 years.” Tommy’s bathroom was lined with planks made to look “as though they had been dragged up off the beach,” says Netto—an echo of “all of the times that there were storms, and fishing boats that were wrecked and people would comb the beaches and make off with the debris,” says Netto. “That was how they built houses out there for centuries.” He interfered whenever the contractor was nailing them to the wall in too even a pattern.
Such poetic excursions require a level of trust on the part of the owners, says Netto, a willingness to take the initial vision and make it into something fantastical. A window is broadened to let in the view, or a room is painted a dark, glossy shade, and suddenly comes to life; or a sandy patch becomes a garden for morning coffee, a hill arises from a plot of earth that was previously flat. When it comes to such flights of the imagination, “you can’t really convince people,” says Netto. “What you have to do is invest in their trust in you. Our job is to give them what they never knew they wanted.”
In this story: hair, Simona Ciorobara; makeup, Kally Sitaras.
