Meandering gardens and woods, sparked with daffodils, peonies and daylilies, flank the straight drive in. Up ahead near the path’s end is an aperture framed by an arbor of apple trees, capturing an elemental view of sky and water: the horizon of the Long Island Sound.
As you reach closer range, you suddenly realize you have been looking not merely through foliage, but also right through the house.
Woven into the landscape, this is architecture of subtlety, a precisely grounded yet quasi-weightless structure, an ethereal rectangle, planted between two existing bosques.
Meanwhile, the entry axis penetrates the pavilion’s simple 4,600-square-foot volume, notching into its far side and emerging as a long, miraculously shallow reflecting pool, incising the lawn with a silvery film, its distant edge dissolving optically into the Sound.
A perimeter path lines the structure’s transparent shell. Freestanding in parallel alignment, the interior walls never meet the enclosure. Instead, they form a virtual box within a box, an implied inner volume.
More than a one-bedroom retreat for a former museum director and his wife, this is also a place of extraordinary 20th century paintings, sculptures, and glassware—much of it conveying a sense of buoyancy or levitation that echoes the pavilion’s lightness.
