Tour a Stunning New York State Home That Was Inspired by Shingle Style Residences
When the search for a weekend residence stretches over four years, houses that had not passed initial muster are bound to get reconsidered. That was the case for a New York husband and wife who, with their longtime friend and interior designer Stacey Gendelman, gave a second thought to a turn-of-the-last-century mansion languishing in Westchester on Long Island Sound. Although the client deemed the house’s septic system too ungainly and the interiors too filled with bric-a-brac to be taken seriously at first glance, a year later they focused more on the lot’s inspiring pairing of woods and coastal landscapes—not to mention the opportunity to call off an exhausting quest. The couple purchased the shoreline property in 2018.
AD100 firm Ike Kligerman Barkley (IKB) had joined the familial project team during the house hunt, and all parties quickly set to solving the Georgian-style building’s shortcomings in earnest. The homeowners committed to a half-mile sewer extension that would benefit approximately 30 other homes along its route. IKB spent six months designing and cost-estimating a renovation to suit three grown children who were slowly but surely partnering up, as well as a set of parents who envisioned aging in place.
“People lived very differently back then: The house had a living room that could hold 200 people, but there was no family room,” the mother recalls. “The only garage was located in a detached guesthouse.” Instead of shoehorning a casual multigenerational life into an artifact from another era, the homeowners, with Gendelman’s guidance, eventually decided to table IKB’s construction drawings and allocate their renovation budget to a bespoke ground-up residence by the firm.
Asked whether clients do such a dramatic about-face on a regular basis, IKB namesake John Ike responds, “This was a little different [from the norm], in that we went down the road of an alternate approach. But the decision-making was sound, because even in this circumstance, design fees are just a fraction of the overall project cost—and [the clients] got what they really wanted.”
What they really wanted, the architect recalls, with laughing modesty, “was the IKB shingle thing.” His colleague, principal Ross Padluck, defines that thing as “a contemporary take on the shingle style that is still familiar and comfortable for a family home.”
Ike notes with more seriousness, “The identifying components of our typical house include a plan that’s one room deep, and which is open and flows. We tend to have pretty large windows, and we employ details like flared gables and intricate shingled accents.” To achieve those signatures here, IKB uniquely employed posts and beams made of kiln-dried white oak, and centering the building’s structural load on this timber frame freed up the perimeter for windows. “The system is almost Miesian; the structure and the amount of glass is super modern. And while I can’t say whether our approach has broad applicability, we are producing good work that makes clients happy.”
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Gendelman describes her efforts similarly. “They are a super-chic and interesting couple, and they wanted a home where they could invite people but also retreat to a private space,” the Purchase, New York–based designer says of her brief. “Yet to keep everyone happy, the project also was an interpretation of the balance between different ideologies.” To meld the wife’s traditionalist sensibility with the husband’s more contemporary bent, Gendelman says she sourced furniture and fixtures that represented the Arts and Crafts in principle rather than style, and she advocated for a finish palette that was appropriate to the environment and informal lifestyle of Long Island Sound.
Today, delight abounds. Padluck praises the deftness with which Gendelman “amplified the architecture,” while Gendelman herself raves, “IKB was so tremendous architecturally, that I could have gotten away with doing just a decent job.” As for the client? “I feel very lucky to wake up every morning to boats and nature, and to appreciate everything we worked so hard to achieve over eight years,” the wife says. “This is our version of the Hamptons, and we can get here in just half an hour.”
