Peaceful shelter, Shelter Island

Out at the end of Long Island where the land fishtails into the North and South Forks, a tiny dollop of of sand appears to have slipped between the two tines and split them.

Shelter Island is twelve square miles of beach accessible only by an eight-minute ferry ride. Twenty-five hundred people live there in the winter, and 25,000 in the summer. It needs no traffic lights.

The tenor of the island is distinctly different from the Hamptons, its tony neighbors to the south. “Shelter Island is friendlier. It’s less populated, lower key and more artistic,” said architect Cary Tamarkin, who just designed and built a second home there. “It’s just big enough to inspire a small group of artistically-minded people to make the hop over.”

His home rises on a foundation of spread concrete footings above a slight rolling berm on three-quarters of an acre surrounded by undevelopable bramble. The residence faces due southeast to Shelter Island Sound, which protects it from some of the harshest weather on the eastern seaboard. There’s also a constant and gentle breeze to shoo the bugs and keep things cool.

The home is, in essence, a cypress-wood box cantilevered on all sides, hovering gracefully over island and sound. Looking out to the water, the view peers back to Long Island with the Left Fork on its right, and the Right Fork just opposite. “It’s like a huge harbor with its outstretched arms around you,” Cary said.

There’d been a 1960s beach shack, “coming apart at the seams,” on the property when he acquired it. He waited three years to tear it down and begin new construction, working on designs for the new 2,800 square feet in the meantime.

“While the family was sleeping, I’d set up a ladder outside to see what the sound of the waves was at eight feet above grade,” he said.

The new cottage is three houses in one. Guest quarters with two bedrooms anchor it at ground level, and are connected by stairway to the main level above. There, kitchen, dining and living areas are separated by breezeway from master suite and children’s bedrooms. “Every bedroom gets to sleep to the sound of the waves,” he said.

He used 100-year-old cypress salvaged from the swamps and rivers of Georgia and Florida for its skin and structure too. Its beams measure sixteen inches tall by six inches wide and thirty-six feet long, and were meticulously crafted for the home by former shipbuilder George Velmachos with Wright and Company.

The design challenge, Cary said, was to accurately respond to the forces of the site – to take advantage of the sounds, the breeze, the light and the views.

“It’s all about outdoor living,” he said.

For more on architect and developer Cary Tamarkin, go to www.tamarkinco.com

On a tiny island off the coast of North Carolina, where the Cape Fear River meets the Atlantic Ocean, architects Chuck and Anna Dietsche have created a community where people are subordinate to their environment.

“It’s the objectification of man in nature,” Chuck Dietsche says about Bald Head Island.  “You get the feeling of what the Garden of Eden was like.”

Instead of a desecration of the landscape with strip malls, asphalt roads and concrete towers, there’s a deliberately-created sense of harmony.

After Andres Duany created the island’s first two streets, Dietsche was named director of planning and development in the early 1990s.  He created the master plan for the island’s 2,500 buildable acres, tucking homes into small groups behind the dunes and along the harbor, without violating the ceiling of the  canopy of 800-year-old live oaks in the maritime forest.

“We created communities by having the houses closer together,” the architect says.

Accessible only by a 20-minute ferry ride, and with transportation on the island only by foot or golf cart, Bald Head provides a refuge for people and wildlife alike.

“You rid yourself of life on the mainland,” Anna Dietsche says.  “You cannot believe how loud the birds and the winds are, because there’s no sound from traffic.”

Its protected wetlands and forests serve as habitat to sea birds, deer, foxes, raccoons, and alligators.

“It’s wild nearby, but you’re in a safety zone,” Chuck Dietsche says.  “It’s designed as an ecologically romantic place.”

Owned and developed by members of the Texas-based Mitchell family of Mitchell Energy, Bald Head has set the standard for sensitive development.  “They wanted an enlightened, neo-traditional built environment,” he says.

And they got it.

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J. Michael Welton writes about architecture, art and design for a number of national publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Dwell magazine. He also edits and publishes an online design magazine at www.architectsandartisans.com.

Show off: Hollander and Connelly demonstrate how they can turn any yard into a custom oasis.

Edmund Hollander and Maryanne Connelly have formed a winning combination over the years.

The prominent New York landscape architects met in the early 1980s in graduate school at Penn, establishing their firm, now located on Park Avenue South, in 1991.

“I was a history major and she was an artist,” Hollander says.  “She could draw like the wind and I knew every plant in the universe.”

They’re equally comfortable designing for modernists Steven Holl or Annabel Selldorf as they are for classicists like Robert A. M. Stern or Jaquelin Robertson.

“Our landscapes are responsive to the style of the architects,” he says

Fans of their work are in luck. They’ve just published “The Private Oasis,” a processional book that leads the reader through the sequences of landscape design, rather than through individual projects.  It’s broken up into the way the pair looks at landscape design.

It opens with an entry sequence that examines how a landscape is approached and what can be seen.  That’s followed by a section on seating and gathering, then by outdoor dining.  Next up is movement and transition, with a focus on allees, walkways, gateways and connective structures.  Finally, the book examines swimming pools, water features and tennis courts.

Seeds for this volume were sown with their first book, “Gardens for the New Country Place.”  This one, though, is intended to be a resource for as many homeowners, architects and students of landscape design as possible.

“That’s why it’s broken up into these areas, rather than by properties,” he says.  “We wanted to show all the ways that people live and use our designs – to show a diverse range of ideas from different properties and different clients.”

It was something of a struggle to select which projects would make the cut, and which would be left out.  But that was a battle with an easy resolution in the end.

“This one is a preview to Volume 2 – ‘The Living Land,’” he says.

For more information, go to www.hollanderdesign.com/

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