Tour Fashion Designer Ulla Johnson’s Ever-Evolving Montauk Retreat
Ulla Johnson and Zach Miner can’t stop talking about their garden. “It’s a spring bounty every weekend with new things in bloom,” says the fashion designer. Her verdant surroundings, after four years of work with landscape guru Miranda Brooks, are finally coming into their own. Bulbs planted last fall are pushing up through the soil. Magnolia trees are blossoming. A flash of pink—the petals of a flowering cherry tree—is visible just outside the living room window.
The couple have relished the process. “A garden takes time to grow into itself,” explains Johnson. “Things move around and find their home. Things you plant come back in a slightly different place. It’s such a beautiful evolution.”
The same could be said of their home out east, constructed circa 2010 by MB Architecture, where they retreat on weekends with their three kids. Like the garden, it’s a little different on every visit: The modular vintage Mario Bellini sofa might remain in a leftover configuration from last night’s dinner party; a stray piece of driftwood—one of the family’s many collections—might end up in someone’s bedroom, thanks to their vizsla, Daphne; a new ceramic piece might arrive in a box, shipped home from a recent trip to Spain.
“It’s all about this idea of layering,” says Johnson, whose elevated bohemian fashion brand follows a similarly eclectic feeling. “Over a lifetime the house will continue to evolve.”
Johnson and her husband, a consultant with an art background, had been spending weekends in Montauk, the windy, low-key hamlet at the easternmost tip of Long Island, for about a decade before they began to look for their own place. This house, as Miner puts it, “checked a lot of very interesting boxes—it was unusual, modern, and had character.” As Johnson says, “Its spirit spoke to us.” When they glimpsed the existing green roof up top, they were sold.
For about five years, they have steadily renovated and furnished the place in phases, with the help of architecture firm Studio Zung and interior designer Alexis Brown, always careful to keep it livable as they work—especially in the summers when they carve out time to surf, swim, hike, and entertain.
To further access the vistas beyond (the house, which sits on top of a hill, offers views of both the ocean and the bay), they added more windows. In the summer, they’re mostly left open so that, as Miner says, “you can basically live outside.” To warm things up, they ripped up manufactured bamboo floors and replaced them with solid Dinesen ash and refinished many walls with hand-applied plaster. They reworked the staircase in ash and powder-coated metal, and streamlined a few spaces, particularly the kitchen, to create a more casual, entertaining-friendly floor plan. Some elements—like the fossil-stone counters in the bathroom—they left just as they were. And then there was the landscape, in which Brooks introduced trees, a peony path, and a cutting garden. “We planted it very informally, so that things feel quite wild and free,” says Johnson, a flower lover who finds endless inspiration for her collections in the garden.
