Tour a Sag Harbor house, where the views 'blow everyone’s mind'

rectangular sag harbour house with glazed facade and open curtains looking towards garden and swimming pool — (Image credit: Nicholas Venezia)

This subtly minimalist Sag Harbor house was born out of serendipity. The clients were looking for a practice to build their holiday retreat in the dynamic town close to the Hamptons. They were introduced to architect Peter DePasquale of Garnett.DePasquale Projects, and hearing he had worked with Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects for years earlier in his career - a studio familiar to them and which they admired - everything clicked into place.

minimalst sag harbour house with large glazed windows and clean aesthetic inside and out

Garnett.DePasquale Sag Harbor house

The couple commissioned the bourgeoining young studio, founded by Pete and his wife Becky Garnett, off the back of this connection, and the trust it brought. They were not wrong to do so. The resulting elegant home, titled Meadowlark, is proof of that.

The house took four years to complete, and 'started with something that looked like a faux whaling museum,' DePasquale says. The design naturally evolved from there, and developed into the final iteration - a single, large box, clad in stained cedar and nodding to minimalist and modernist architecture, infused with its authors' warm sensitivity and contemporary sensibilities.

The brief asked for a four-bedroom, two-bathroom house, placed in a relatively tight plot, but that didn't stop the dynamic architecture pair. 'There was a lot of investigation into how stairs could work, how we could make the floor plates make sense,' Garnett says

Privacy was a key requirement for the clients too, and responding to that the architects crafted a more opaque, 'quiet' facade towards the street side, which opens up to the garden and swimming pool towards the rear. This openness bring the interior at one with the outdoors effortlessly at any hour of the day, but it can be tempered with floor to ceiling curtains if needed.

This series of simple yet impactful moves defines the pared down, gentle nature of Meadowlark. Colour softens the minimalism inside, with green hues added through different elements throughout the ground level.

At the same time, carefully framed vistas, both through the interiors and out towards the greenery, are what make this the dreamy, but also highly functional countryside retreat that this Sag Harbor house is. 'Pete’s focus was on orienting and reorienting one’s views,' Garnett says. 'It blows everyone’s mind.'

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Ellie Stathaki is the Architecture & Environment Director at Wallpaper*. She trained as an architect at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece and studied architectural history at the Bartlett in London. Now an established journalist, she has been a member of the Wallpaper* team since 2006, visiting buildings across the globe and interviewing leading architects such as Tadao Ando and Rem Koolhaas. Ellie has also taken part in judging panels, moderated events, curated shows and contributed in books, such as The Contemporary House (Thames & Hudson, 2018), Glenn Sestig Architecture Diary (2020) and House London (2022).