People who live in modern houses don’t generally go in for clutter. The look is spare, open, uninflected. “Less is more” is decidedly the clarion call of modernism. But one person’s tastefully understated is another’s cold, stark and off-putting. But if modern doesn’t have to be sleek and shiny, restrained doesn’t have to be uncomfortable or antiseptic either.

Take the glorious home architect William J. Reese designed for clients on Long Island, Rose and Ewen Cameron. Rose, who did the interior design, is also a trained architect, and the house combines her love of the Japanese minimalist and Zen master of concrete Tadao Ando, on the one hand, with the indoor/outdoor California style of Rudolf Schindler, a favorite of Reese’s, on the other. The 50-by-20-foot living room of that house doesn’t have much in it, on first glance, but it’s still incredibly inviting, comfortable, and visually intriguing. It’s just subtle.

Here, the architecture itself makes the most of geometry. The concrete wall shows the form of its marine-grade plywood forms; the planks in the Honduran mahogany walls create an understated striation that works as a perfect foil to the dramatic grid on the the floor and barely-there ceiling. (Notice how the horizontal lines of the concrete fireplace wall carry on the depth of the structural beam between the sliding glass doors and the clerestory windows up against the ceiling.)

A single Oriental rug from ABC Carpet & Home in New York City softens the room, offers a historical context for the overall design, lends an instant sense of luxury, grounds the main seating area, and provides the only overt “ornamentation” in the room (and the muted, neutral color palette). 

Far from suggesting isolation, the furnishings connote social connection, particularly in the use of pairs: Two polished coconut trunk barrels, two oversized lamps with banana-leaf shades; two Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs from Knoll and two ceramic side table/stools in a polished-steel glaze from Calypso Home in East Hampton (631/324-8146), which also sourced the three gray-leather poufs.

Further, all of the accent pieces have visually softening curves that play against the straight lines: The natural tree trunk is echoed in the cylindrical lampshades and gleaming side tables; even the chairs have attractive arcs. The trunks and lamps are neutral and natural (signifying old), but the silvery side tables are clearly manufactured and modern. The coffee table from R Gallery is rigidly geometric, but made of warmly organic zebra wood, bridging old and new. As in any Zen conundrum, balance is all.

Why no art? The views are the art. Indoor rooms, any astute modernist will tell you, extend past the footprint of the house to the property line—or to the view, if you’re lucky enough to have one. Here, a single shockingly bright throw in a tone of magenta sympathetic to the blue in the sofa and the carpet makes a statement as dramatic as the patch of crimson on the shoulder of a red-winged blackbird (a species that thrives, by the way, near the south shore of Long Island).

So the next time you see an “empty room,” look again. It may have more in it than you think.

Michael Lassell,
Features Director, Metropolitan Home