Reimagining the Beach House

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Some people have a passion for Dickens first editions, French paperweights, classic cars or mementos of the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. But few have as many passions—or as many collections—as Jeffrey J. Steiner, a Viennese who grew up in Istanbul, who went to college in England and who now has his business headquarters in the United States. "I'm a collector by nature," he says. "Coins, stamps, paintings—whatever you want."

That sweeping whatever also includes real estate. Steiner—the chairman and chief executive officer of the Fairchild Corporation, one of the world's leading suppliers of airplane parts and services—currently has seven houses scattered over three continents. He has one each in London, Paris and New York; a fourth in St. Tropez, in southern France; a fifth in southern Turkey; and a sixth in Virginia, surrounded by nine hundred green and rolling acres. All are unusual, but perhaps none has a more remarkable or more beautiful setting than residence number seven, Steiner's new house in Southampton, on the south shore of Long Island.

Three stories high, the house sits at the end of a tiny peninsula that protrudes into the often turbulent waters of Shinnecock Bay. The quiet preserve of the Shinnecock Indian Reservation occupies the other side of the bay, and except for some distant neighbors, Steiner's surroundings are almost unspoiled, something rare indeed in the increasingly congested Hamptons. Before building, Steiner owned another handsome house just a few miles away, but it lacked the one quality every collector covets: uniqueness. "I had no view," he explains, "and I wanted one."

The very thing that makes Steiner's location so special—the surrounding waters and wetlands—also made construction a special challenge. Steiner was allowed to build so close to the water, in fact, only because he was replacing a cottage erected before the enactment of the wetland protections. Approval came with a condition, however. He had to build on the footprint of the house he had torn down. Since Steiner wanted more space than the previous house had provided, architectural designer Dimitris Balamotis was forced to build up rather than out—three stories rather than the two Steiner had planned.

Once the environmental regulators had been satisfied, Balamotis had to contend with the environment itself. If the house, which juts into the bay like the prow of a ship, enjoys nature's beauties, it also endures her insults—rain and fog, of course, but also fierce winds, an occasional hurricane and, in bad winters, an almost endless expanse of ice. "We had to build in what can be a very, very hostile environment," says construction manager Hamilton Hoge. "When the bay ices up in the winter, it looks like tundra."

To protect the house from such assaults, Hoge and his associate Vincent Galardi worked with Balamotis to give it an invisible armor. "It was built as if it were a boat," says Hoge. "We knew that unless we did it properly, the whole thing would come apart." First-floor walls are thus ten inches thick rather than the customary six. The exterior moldings, the doors and the terrace railings are made of mahogany—pine was considered too soft—and window hardware is bronze, imported from Germany.

In an effort to make the house truly shipshape, Hoge used a laser level to guarantee that all lines would be exact. "I'll bet my paycheck that you won't find anything more than an eighth of an inch off in a forty-foot run on that house," boasts Hoge. And something called a blower door test was used to detect drafts: Air was pumped out of the house with a fan, and the vacuum that resulted allowed electronic instruments to sniff for air leaks. None were found.

As construction neared completion, designer Mica Ertegun and David B. Barritt, her associate at Manhattan's MAC II, worked to create a relaxed atmosphere aboard that landlocked ship. They concentrated first on the living room, a large space with a vaulted ceiling twenty-six feet high. "Mr. Steiner is European, and he's not used to those little Victorian houses," says Ertegun. "Neither am I, to tell you the truth." To anchor the outsize living room and to give it focus, she and Barritt designed a similarly outsize low table, around which they placed big and fluffy sofas. "People really like to sit in circles," she explains.

For upholstery, they chose fabrics that appeared a little faded. "I don't want fabrics to look new," says Ertegun. "But I don't like the shabby-chic look either." Faded, too, is the living room carpet, a needlepoint. "It doesn't jump in your face," she says. "Anything that's too bright takes away from the art and objects."

Much of the furniture, as well as the paintings and objects, Steiner already owned. Greeting visitors as they step through the front door, for example, is a giant picture, nearly six feet wide and more than nine feet high, of a Japanese wedding. It was painted by a Polish count, Andrzej Mniszek, who practiced in Paris during the mid-nineteenth century and who was fascinated by Japanese subjects, and it reflects, in its own way, Steiner's multinational background. "It's so big that we could find no other place for it," says Ertegun, "but there it's perfect."

The Japanese wedding is only one example, however, of the miniature United Nations Steiner has made for himself on Shinnecock Bay. Twenty-two portraits of sultans, set side by side, peer down from the living room cornice—"I'm fond of Ottoman art," says Steiner—while above the dining table hangs a circa 1800 Russian chandelier, like one that might have illuminated Rostov family dinners in War and Peace . Near it are two Swedish gilt-bronze-and-cut-glass mirrors, also circa 1800. But in his own bedroom, he placed a prized piece of Americana: a large, standing electric music box. "The Original Champagne Music of Lawrence Welk," proclaims the lettering on the front, and when a nickel is inserted, a midget band, decked out in bright green jackets, plays ragtime. The Welk box is only one item in yet another Steiner collection; he has twenty or so similar contrivances at his farm in Virginia.

When he planned his house, Steiner asked that every room have a view. "Without going overboard," he elaborates, "I also wanted an elegant house."

An elegant house demands elegant landscaping, but since well-mannered trees and shrubs—arborvitae, for instance—would not survive a harsh winter on Shinnecock Bay, landscape architect George C. Lynch had his own challenge. His solution was to plant hardy alternatives that could be taught manners, such as single-stem corkscrew willows and cedars with the tight growth patterns of arborvitae. "This was one of the most difficult sites I've worked on," says Lynch. "It's more exposed than a property on the ocean."

Steiner spends summers in St. Tropez, and he visits Southampton most often in the spring, when egrets and ospreys nest in the reeds and high grass, and schools of trigger fish parade past his dock. But even on bleak winter days, the days that worry architects and builders, the grand sweep of shore and bay always amazes. The reflection of the water dances on his soaring living room ceiling, and though their expressions never change, those twenty-two sultans could not have a more entrancing view if they were still in Topkapi Palace, looking out at the Bosporus and the Golden Horn.