FIVE YEARS AGO, the interior designer Ben Brougham was about to begin renovating his late 1970s home on the northern shore of New York’s Shelter Island when a nearby house came on the market — a 1971 Norman Jaffe-designed waterfront property that Brougham had long admired. Apart from an addition that the architect had installed a decade after it was built, it hadn’t been touched since it was commissioned by its original owner, Meyer Osofsky, who founded the women’s wear label Aileen in 1948.
Brougham, 46, quickly put in a winning offer for the 5,500-square-foot property and began updating it almost as fast, knowing that construction costs would only increase as the pandemic progressed. Having grown up among the farms and country estates of Wiltshire in southwest England, Brougham had developed an obsession with decorating early on: He and his mother frequently went thrift shopping and, by the time he was 12, sold antiques together at a local market. In his 20s, he began his career in London as a set dresser for film and television, which he eventually tired of, he says, because “you create something beautiful and then it’s destroyed the next day.” Next he moved to New York, where he secured an internship in 2006 at Jonathan Adler. Some two decades later, Brougham is now the creative director at the company, where he works on residential and hospitality projects and helps conceive new products.
Adler, 59, who also owns a home on Shelter Island, is the one who had lured him out east 15 years ago. While Brougham’s previous house was fine for a small group, this one has four bedrooms encircling its sunken living room and lots of space for hosting parties. So one of his first priorities was relocating the kitchen: Osofsky had a private chef who preferred to cook in a closed-off environment next to the dining area, but Brougham worked with the New York-based architect Reid Balthaser to create a new kitchen in the previously unfinished basement, which was spacious but dark. He then installed a staircase — which allows light to come in from the dining area above — and several downstairs windows, one of which frames the Orient Point Lighthouse across Gardiner’s Bay. The original kitchen was reimagined as a butler’s pantry/barroom that connects to the lower level with a new dumbwaiter, and Brougham keeps several areas stocked with snacks and toiletries for weekend company. “It was designed to feel hotel-like,” Brougham says. “When the house is full, we can go the whole day without seeing each other.”
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