When the architect William Ryall raised the steel beam skeleton for his new getaway in Orient, N.Y., a local guessed that a basketball gymnasium was under construction.
The finished house instead looked like a modernist villa and Mr. Ryall’s neighbors in Orient, a hamlet at the tip of the North Fork of Long Island, began to view themselves as potential clients. Mr. Ryall has gone on to build an exceptional collection of modern houses there, sown like seeds over the past quarter century in this hothouse of artists, designers and creators.
The architect, 74, calls himself a “refugee from Ohio” who arrived in New York in 1977 and always wore pressed button-downs and baggy trousers to Studio 54, the famed nightlife spot. “Maybe a striped tie,” he allowed. He has practiced with one architecture group or another in New York for decades, helping design the Gladstone Gallery and Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. His current firm, Ryall Sheridan Carroll Architects, has three partners and three assistants, in a compact loft on Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron district. “Very non-hierarchal,” he called it.
Two decades ago in Orient, Mr. Ryall’s finished home attracted the attention of Amy Astley, then a Vogue editor, and her husband, Christopher Astley, an artist. The couple admired the house’s translucent plastic front wall, which glows like an electric lantern after dark.
They originally hired Mr. Ryall to renovate their Tribeca loft. Next, he expanded their one-bedroom cottage in Orient, on a tall bluff overlooking Long Island Sound.
They had purchased that property from Murray Moss, the noted New York design dealer, and his partner, judging it unpretentious yet refined. It was “a funky house, not a fancy house,” said Ms. Astley, 58, now the editor of Architectural Digest.
Mr. Ryall soon discovered that the house was suspiciously moist, he said, and its studs were “composting.”
The remodel repaired the damage, which was unknown to the sellers, added two bedrooms and repeated the translucent plastic from Mr. Ryall’s home for the wall of a new stairwell. “We’re completely simpatico, and I trust him,” Ms. Astley said in a phone interview from her family room in Orient last month.
Her house has unpainted gray exterior siding, an architectural signature of Mr. Ryall’s beach houses, made from antique lumber from Brooklyn. Subsequent projects switched to Catskills hemlock milled regionally, in Saugerties, N.Y.
The Astleys also acquired the lot next door and had Mr. Ryall back again for a project where he installed an in-ground swimming pool wreathed with wildflowers.
To hire Mr. Ryall is to join an informal creative club on the North Fork where he is a founding member.
Another Ryall project in Orient is the expansion of the small traditional house of Amy Gross, then the editor in chief of O, The Oprah Magazine. “If I was more of a style person, I would have knocked it down,” she said.
Instead, Mr. Ryall made-over the front with a blocky modern timber loggia smothered in white climbing hydrangeas. He also expanded the house, and the upper floor of the addition is a new primary bedroom where Ms. Gross, 83, reads. Downstairs is her library with shelves for her books, wide picture windows to view the sunset over the water and a fireplace of sandblasted concrete blocks made on Long Island. “I can’t get over the beauty of it,” she said.
Mr. Ryall shares his Orient home with his husband, Barry Bergdoll, 70, the former chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. The couple also have a townhouse in Harlem, and Mr. Bergdoll, an architectural history professor at Columbia University, leases an apartment in Paris.
But Orient is where Mr. Bergdoll writes books and lectures most productively thanks to what he calls the “delicious isolation.” Thought that is not to say life there is lonely.
The home’s enormous front door, which is Le Corbusier-inspired red and is set into a plastic front wall, usually sits wide open, an explicit invitation for visitors when Mr. Ryall is home.
The couple’s former next door neighbor, who has since passed away, was a museum curator of decorative arts who became a regular at Saturday breakfasts prepared in their double-height kitchen.
The house is a “hub we’re lucky to have,” said Ted Sheridan, 56, who is a partner at Mr. Ryall’s architectural firm and a frequent overnight guest.
Mr. Ryall’s front door is also a prototype for the oversized front doors he uses in his designs in Orient.
He often builds homes to a European standard, which vibes with many residents on the North Fork. Insulated windows are triple-paned, and the roofs have solar arrays. Ms. Astley still loves her plastic wall, which is corrugated to provide insulation, but more recently Mr. Ryall’s firm has avoided petroleum as much as possible, not just for construction materials but also for heating.
Walls in the firm’s homes are a foot thick and highly insulated with mineral wool fiber rather than the usual spray foam that is flammable and “doesn’t breathe,” said Niall Carroll, 38, the newest of the firm’s three partners.
At one modern house Mr. Ryall’s firm designed in Orient, he and his husband swim together in the lap pool and share meals. The home was designed for Leslie Cohen, 69, a founder of Art + Commerce, a New York creative agency that represents artists. She and her husband, Clifford Cohen, 69, a former public school counselor who now teaches at Hunter College, moved there after they sold their old white house with a cupola in central Orient, seeking a refuge in an even quieter area of the village.
Mr. Ryall designed the new house, down a driveway winding through a fallow potato field. The lot is large, and they could have built four times the square footage, or multiple homes. But the Cohens wanted only 3,500 square feet, sharply less than people have across the water in the Hamptons, where few build “the smallest house they’ll be comfortable with,” Mr. Ryall said.
He challenged Ms. Cohen to significantly elevate the house on towering exposed concrete foundations, having the hardware store deliver a 10-foot ladder she could climb to preview the water view across the road. She said he could do as he liked.
Like so many by the firm, this house offers an extra living room in the form of a large screened porch with a high ceiling and a fireplace. The look is modern but the concept homespun, an ecological alternative to air-conditioning on evenings when “you can hardly stand being outside because of the mosquitoes,” Mr. Ryall said.
As their landscape of native plants began to overgrow, Ms. Cohen expressed concern to Mr. Ryall. The couple woke up subsequently to discover Mr. Ryall sitting outside on a chair, sketching new plans for the yard in the morning light: a manicured garden court with hornbeam hedges around an emerald lawn. Mr. Cohen said: “Little did we know that he came with the house.”
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