Some people call Shelter Island, New York, which is just a nine-minute ferry ride from Long Island’s glamorous South Fork, the Unhampton. But architectural designer and interior decorator Russell Piccione isn’t one of them. When it comes to this idyllic destination of resort cottages and nature preserves, he prefers to focus not on what it isn’t but on what it is—namely, he says, “understated and low-key.” Those are the same words he uses to describe the two-story waterfront getaway he crafted there for a Connecticut couple and their young children, in Dering Harbor, a historic village on the north side of the island. “It’s refined but not flashy,” he observes, “a place in which you can feel at home.”
“Dering Harbor has a beautiful collection of houses,” Piccione explains, “and I found it important to think I was contributing to an ensemble. A house here is expected to look Colonial, be covered in white-painted clapboard, and stand no more than 35 feet tall.” But there was a problem. Wrapping an 18th-century-style skin around a large contemporary structure—the family wanted ten bedrooms—would have resulted in a much too imposing building. Fine for a hall in Harvard Yard, perhaps, but out of place in a deliberately quiet corner of a famously restrained isle.
The answer, the designer decided, was not less Georgian, but more or at least more Georges, which would give the dwelling a compelling narrative sweep. Now it looks as if it were constructed in stages, over several generations, as a family grew along with its fortunes. Distinguished by a grand bay window, a new wing containing the dining room reflects the vocabulary of the mid-18th century, when George II sat on the English throne. The center section, which includes the original saltbox, references neoclassicism under George III. And the bedroom wing, sporting a prominent pediment, is Greek Revival, a mode popular during the time of George IV—fervently so along the Eastern Seaboard. To all but the trained eye, these distinctions are noticed only subliminally, as Piccione intended.
source: architecturaldigest