Rolling Woods Residence

In renovating this 1980s house in East Hampton, our studio paid tribute to the home’s postmodern roots while giving it a contemporary vocabulary. We developed an aesthetic we referred to in-house as “soft brutalism”: strong materials and bold forms that maintain approachability through scale, tactility, and opportunities for interaction. The postmodern concept of sign-and-symbol-as-signifier also informed our outlook, shaping the spatial experience. At the entry of the home, a glass-block partition divides an open living/dining space; a circular motif defines each block, establishing a pattern that repeats across other rooms. In the kitchen, we applied architectural materials with heft—concrete and raw aluminum—in millwork detail, creating a look that rejects being too much of any one era. A series of sculptural steel-and-pine chairs surrounds a bespoke round dining table—a nod to the meeting tables at the United Nations. Both grand and intimate, it establishes the room as a destination within the home. A custom-milled squiggle handrail guides the way to bedrooms, where we designed punctured headboards with that recurring circular emblem.