At Home With Architect Lee Skolnick

For architect Lee Skolnick, it is a relief—and a change of pace—that he didn’t design his Sag Harbor home. He’d already made that mistake once, he said, except the locale was North Haven.

The year was 1992. Mr. Skolnick and his wife, Jo Ann Secor, moved into their custom modern home, which was something of an autobiography for the architect, he recalled. It sampled materials like brick, cedar, mahogany and copper in its construction, each representing different bits and pieces of his serendipitous life, he said.

“It was a real interesting sort of modern children’s composition of putting together blocks,” Mr. Skolnick said at his home in Sag Harbor last month. “People were always coming to look at it. They’d show up out of nowhere. We’d get up in the morning, look out the window and there would be somebody walking around outside with a camera.”

For a little peace and quiet, and privacy, Mr. Skolnick fantasized about moving upstate and buying 200 acres of land there, he said. But instead, after 10 years in North Haven, he fell for a 4,500-square-foot abode on Long Pond in the middle of the Sag Harbor woods.

At the time, the house was an incredible wreck, he recalled. But in a simple renovation, the couple changed out the appliances, painted all of the walls white and stained the wood floors dark.

“That was our design, and then we put things we love in here,” Mr. Skolnick gestured around his living room, speaking over the hum of African music playing in the background. “I decided it would be best for me not to live in a piece of architecture, myself, here. Not that I wouldn’t in other places. The reason is that I’ve done so much work out here since 1978, when I was in school. I wanted this to be a retreat.”

On his last legs, “physically and emotionally,” he said, while at the Cooper Union School of Architecture, a classmate suggested that Mr. Skolnick get out of Manhattan and escape to the Hamptons. And so, in 1978, he did.

For $1,500 for the summer, Mr.

Skolnick rented a four-room, circa-1752 house on Madison Street in Sag Harbor. After the summer, he paid $300 in rent every month, until 1984, the same year he married his wife and moved into a turn-of-the-century “worker’s Victorian” on Howard Street in the village. That house is where the couple began to raise their children, Elizabeth and Harry, now 25 and 20, respectively.

Living on the East End, it didn’t take long for Mr. Skolnick to infiltrate the artistic community. He soon began designing homes and additions for prominent residents—Susan Rothenberg, Eric Fischl and April Gornik to name a few—in the early 1980s, he said.

At the same time, the architect’s career was traveling along a parallel course in museum exhibition design, thanks to his now-wife, who gave him his first gig at the Staten Island Children’s Museum, where she worked at the time.

“I always like to say that I hired him and I was his boss,” Ms. Secor recalled, adding that she and her future husband met and fell in love as a result. “He had never designed an exhibit before but had done theater set work. He started at the museum in 1980, and four years later, we were married.”

Museum design is a plum project for architects, Mr. Skolnick explained, and doesn’t usually happen until later in their careers. Frank Lloyd Wright, for instance, designed the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan at age 73. But Mr. Skolnick thought he could sneak in the side door by designing museum exhibits and gradually making his way up to museum architecture.

“It worked. It wasn’t a real strategy, but it was in the back of my mind,” he said. “By the time I was 40, I was designing new museums, which was really exciting. I think most architects, deep down, feel they’re doing this to help society. While we’re excited about our own creative exploration, there’s also a sense that architecture makes a difference.”

Now at 58, Mr. Skolnick has designed more than 60 museums all over the world. Currently, the architect’s Manhattan-based firm, Lee H. Skolnick Architecture + Design Partnership, is working on science museums in Saudi Arabia and is in discussion with the Children’s Museum of the East End in Bridgehampton—his brainchild—about new exhibitions, he said.

The family—with the exception of Elizabeth, who lives in Florida—splits their time between Manhattan and Sag Harbor. They also spend time at a home that Mr. Skolnick designed on the Caribbean island of Anguilla, where the architect has also designed villas and resorts.

In recent years, Mr. Skolnick has scaled back on the number of projects he takes on in the Hamptons, he said. It has to be something special, something that challenges him. None of his projects look the same or stereotypical, he added, saying that he finds what is unique about a project’s environment and translates that into a design.

“The thing I don’t give a shit about is the styles,” he said. “People get hypersensitive about the style of the house. Is it old-fashioned?, is it shingle-style?, is it modern?, whatever modern means. To me, if you think in those terms, you missed the boat.”

Designing on the East End is the same as anywhere else, Mr. Skolnick said. It’s the same process. But at the same time, it’s completely different, he added with a laugh, because it’s about identifying what is unique to any particular area.

“In the Hamptons, it’s the light, it’s the proximity to the water,” he said. “It’s the farmland, although we’re losing a lot of it. It’s about being out here in hurricanes. It’s about being here on the hottest summer day. And it’s the people.”

Mr. Skolnick doesn’t consider himself to be a buttoned-up professional, he said, and he stumbled into the occupation after taking an architectural theory and history class at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. He’d originally aspired to become a composer or conductor, following his passion for music that began at age 10 when he picked up a guitar.

“That class was one of those happenstance things that happened in my life,” he recalled. “Early architecture theory said that in order to be an architect, you had to learn about everything. And then you had to integrate that knowledge into your work. An architect was a scientist and an artist and a humanist and a philosopher and a business person and a politician. And unless you understood that, you couldn’t be a real architect.

“It was like a light went off,” he continued. “Here’s something where I’ll have to spend the rest of my life continuing to learn about all these things, and then the more I learn about them, the better I’ll be at doing this. Perfect.”

Before transferring to Cooper Union, Mr. Skolnick backpacked across Europe to find the buildings he’d read about and studied in class, he said.

“I did the grand tour on the cheap and I was absolutely convinced,” he said. “This was for me.”

Mr. Skolnick’s time at Cooper Union was life-changing, he said. “Opened up my mind 1,000 percent,” he said. “10,000 percent.”

The architect’s love for music hasn’t died with his career choice, though. In his basement, he keeps a drum set, a pair of guitars—one a 12-string Rickenbacker that he calls his “piece of candy”—and a keyboard, where he often jams with his friends.

The house shows off the couple’s eclectic taste, decorated with pieces by their local artist friends, including a portrait of their children Harry and Elizabeth by Mr. Fischl. There is also room for Mr. Skolnick’s antique tool and toaster collections, and Ms. Secor’s collection of bird artwork.

In his spare time, Mr. Skolnick enjoys playing tennis and cooking with his wife, he said. On his way out the door at the end of the interview, Mr. Skolnick picked at a gingerbread pear cake freshly baked by his wife, who was cutting several slices. She playfully tapped at his hand as he pulled it away with another morsel.

“Wow, this is really good,” he said, letting a few crumbs drop on the kitchen counter. “Not that I’m surprised.”