New Life on Long Island

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Rarely does the office provide aesthetic inspiration for the home, but as Michael Newman, former chief financial officer of Ralph Lauren Polo, watched the design of the firm's New York headquarters take shape, he couldn't help but feel that Peter Shelton and Lee Mindel, of Shelton, Mindel Associates, were just the architects to transform the Long Island house he shared with his wife, Carol. He promptly asked the partners to his house.

What Shelton and Mindel found was a less than distinguished ranch house—a period piece from the sixties, when a good many of Long Island's great estates were being relentlessly divided and subdivided and houses such as the Newmans' were springing up across the landscape. "It looked as if it belonged in a scene from The Sopranos ," says Mindel. "Still, it was solid and well built, and the property was beautiful, which is why the owners bought the place to begin with. Peter and I saw a project with potential."

Although the owners had revamped a number of interior details soon after they acquired the house eight years ago, the changes, admits Carol Newman, were decorative rather than architectural. "We replaced sliding doors with French doors, laid down new floors and updated fixtures, but it was all rather tentative. The house lacked unity, and we weren't sure how to achieve it."

Before Shelton and Mindel could even consider any architectural intervention, however, they had to resolve a far more fundamental problem—the house's flawed siting. "It was an all too typical instance of the original builders not understanding or simply ignoring the rural context," Mindel says. "The pool had been built just outside the back of the house and acted like a kind of boundary, an obstacle to the house's integration into the landscape. Not to mention that in the Northeast, a pool is hideous a full seven months of the year, and this pool happened to be visible from virtually every room in the house."

The architects persuaded the Newmans to relocate the pool to a lower tract of the property, one that benefited from greater exposure to the sun. They then designed a series of walls, built of indigenous fieldstone, which function both as retaining walls and as borders, defining as well as concealing the pool area from the house. "They serve a definite purpose, but they're also sculptural and provide a way of subtly alluding to the classic estates in the neighborhood, which use so much of this stone," explains Mindel. "They're very much about establishing a sense of place."

Imbuing the ranch house with a more logical layout was, says Mindel, a particularly daunting task. "The interior followed an open plan, but it was far too exposed," recalls Mindel. "There was no place to hide." The architects saw the need to anchor the house, to give it a center and to impose a hierarchy on the interior spaces. They extended the living room both upward and outward, creating an additional massing at the center that breaks up what was a monotonous roofline. The new living room has become the house's focal point; walls, albeit with generous thresholds, now separate spaces that were ill defined. "Formerly, one walked in the front door and was confronted with everything all at once," says Mindel. "Now there are four options: the entrance hall, the foyer, the dining room or the living room. Each space has its own character, scale, light and function."

As Shelton and Mindel's work on the house was drawing to a close, the owners asked them to take charge of the interior design. "It just didn't make sense for Peter and Lee not to be involved in the interior," insists Carol Newman. "Not after everything they had done to transform this house. By sticking with the same architects both inside and out, I think we managed to create a clear, consistent style."

While many of Shelton and Mindel's projects, among them fourteen AIA award winners, display purity of volume and form, the architects were well aware that the Newman house was no corporate headquarters or SoHo loft. It would require a warmer, more conventional design. They mixed classic twentieth-century furniture and objects with the occasional antique and came up with some custom-made pieces when the need arose.

The tone is immediately set in the entrance hall, where a circa 1930 tubular chair by Dutch designer Mart Stam sits beside a Regency table. The walls, painted an eggshell hue, are bare but for a gilt mirror. In the living room, it is the light-reflecting tones of the fabrics used for the sofas and chairs that provide a contemporary feeling. The room's furnishings and their arrangement, however, remain traditional. "This is the most formal space in the house, so we placed a nineteenth-century mahogany table in the center of the room to give a sense of weight," explains Mindel. "The remaining furnishings, like the chair by Fritz Henningsen, the chandelier by Gilbert Poillerat and the Jansen chairs are all modern classics. The room is elegant but inviting."

Although the architects raised the living room ceiling to create a degree of verticality, they lowered the dining room ceiling to convey a sense of intimacy. There, they kept the furnishings to a minimum: a mahogany sideboard (one of the few pieces that the Newmans kept from their previous décor), a dining table of German oak and glass that the architects designed and wicker chairs by Mogensen. Floor-to-ceiling windows offer views of the new garden, and there is no pool in sight.

"I've always believed that good architecture has a redemptive quality about it," explains Mindel. The notion couldn't be more apt. A ranch house made up of ambiguous spaces, cut off from its surroundings and very much in need of unity has become something quite different. "If the Newman house looked far removed from the estate from which the property was carved, now it appears worthy of its surroundings," Lee Mindel continues. Thus, a house has been duly redeemed.