At Home with Terrie Sultan

When Terrie Sultan accepted the position of director of the Parrish Art Museum earlier this year, she and her husband, artist Christopher French, left behind their life in Houston, Texas, and the charming two-bedroom 1920s bungalow they had filled with happy memories.

“It was a great little house—the first single-family home we owned during our 20-year marriage,” said Ms. Sultan, who served as director of the Blaffer Gallery at the Art Museum of the University of Houston for eight years.

Although sentimental, Ms. Sultan is pragmatic when it comes to picking up roots and moving to new places for the love of her career. During her 20-plus years as a writer, curator and museum administrator, she has lived in New York City, Boston, Washington, D.C., Paris and the Lone Star State. But the North Carolina native has always considered the East End of Long Island a home-away-from-home.

“I’ve been visiting my brother (prominent contemporary painter and printmaker Donald Sultan) in Sag Harbor for years, and even wrote some of my favorite books in his garden, so there was a big draw to move here and be close to him,” said the author of 40 publications, including “Chuck Close: Process and Collaboration” and the upcoming book, “Damaged Romanticism.”

When Ms. Sultan learned that the Parrish’s previous director, Trudy Kramer, was retiring after 26 years from the helm of Long Island’s oldest art museum, she jumped at the chance to step into the well-worn shoes of her longtime museum colleague.

“It was an honor to be chosen for the position. I’m looking forward to building on the Parrish’s remarkable history and spearheading the museum’s future growth,” she said, discussing the museum’s future relocation from Southampton Village to a 14-acre site in Water Mill.

The new $70 million project, designed by the internationally-renowned architecture firm of Herzog & de Meuron, will offer expanded space for the museum’s permanent collection, as well as improve upon the museum’s resources for special exhibitions, public programming and education.

Because Ms. Sultan accepted the position in January and was on the job full-time by April 1, she and her husband had only a few weeks to uproot their life in the Southwest. Given the time crunch, the couple opted to search for a long-term rental instead of making an immediate home purchase.

After looking at about a half dozen homes in Water Mill, Southampton, Bridgehampton and Sag Harbor, the Ms. Sultan and Mr. French fell in love with a pristine 2,800-square-foot contemporary home with four bedrooms and 2½ baths overlooking a farm field in Water Mill that was available for a two-year lease, with an option to renew for additional years.

Ms. Sultan said they found many things appealing about the home: it had an open floor plan that was perfect for entertaining; enough space for Mr. French to plant a large vegetable garden; and a three-bay garage and finished basement which the home’s owners said Mr. French could convert into working studio space.

But the clincher for Ms. Sultan was the fact that the house was a short commute to work and “literally 500 yards away” from the location of the new museum site.

“I just loved the idea of being able to walk to the construction site once we complete the fund-raising effort and break ground,” she said.

Ms. Sultan and Mr. French also appreciated the fact that the home’s owners (whom she declined to name) were “incredibly generous” in allowing them to decorate the home with their own furniture, and hang their extensive art collection on the neutral white walls.

“This house is very different from the bungalow we had in Houston. Chris and I are very urban people and, over the years, we’ve lived in lofts and industrial spaces. So we really liked this house’s openness and the amazing amount of light that streams in,” she explained. “People talk about the light on Long Island and how inspirational it is to artists. I never really understood that, but now I do.”

Although she’s already logging many hours at the museum each week (on the day of the interview, she was 62 days into the implementation of her initial “100 Day” plan), Ms. Sultan and her husband have found the time to decorate the rental to their liking.

Their extensive collection of vintage Heywood-Wakefield furniture, for example, is evident throughout the house. The living room pieces—a sofa and two chairs lushly upholstered in brick-colored velvet—are just a few standouts. The nearby dining room also showcases a Heywood-Wakefield dining table, buffet and several side and arm chairs—all crafted in the company’s signature Northern Yellow Birch.

“I must admit that most of the decisions about furnishings are Christopher’s—he has excellent taste. I never imagined that I’d be the kind of person who owns stuffed velvet furniture. I’ve always seen myself as a Calvin Klein minimalist. But he saw these pieces and thought we should have them. And, of course, now I love them too,” she said.

The couple has carried the “Early Moderne” and retro-chic look into the adjoining kitchen, with its maple cabinetry, by placing leather and chrome bar stools at the center island and polypropylene-and-chrome Umbra OH chairs (in green and orange) around the kitchen table.

“These are a good story too,” said Ms. Sultan, pointing to the sumptuous celadon pillows on the sofa. “My mother-in-law, Elizabeth French, is a really gifted craftswoman and seamstress and she made all these pillows and three sets of bedding for us.”

Especially in the master bedroom, Ms. French’s handiwork can be found in the richly textured gold-and-moss green comforter on the couple’s massive black iron bed. Coordinating decorative pillows are in such abundance that they nearly reach the foot of the bed.

“Christopher thinks they’re pretty, but he lets me make the bed every morning,” laughed Ms. Sultan, who admitted to having an “organized and neat” personality.

As is fitting for the home of an artist and a museum director, works by well-known and emerging artists (many of them close friends) hang on practically every wall of the house.

“It took a while to decide where to hang everything,” she admitted. “Christopher and I wanted to find the right juxtapositions of the works of art, and make them intellectually stimulating.”

Walking through each room like a true curator, Ms. Sultan pointed out dozens of museum-quality pieces, providing histories for each cherished piece and discussing the creative genius behind each artist. The couple’s collection of prints, paintings and sculpture includes works by Ida Applebroog, L.C. Armstrong, Dixie Friend Gay, Ken Aptekar, Robert Morris, Ralph Johnson, Max Hirshfeld and Ken Ashton.

The living room, with its soaring ceiling, is the perfect spot for a 4-foot by 5-foot surreal charcoal drawing by Santa Fe artist James Drake of ghostly polecats etched into a highly decorated room interior. The black-and-white work stands out in its placement over the wood-burning fireplace.

“He’s an incredible draftsman and I gave a show of his work when I was curator of Contemporary Art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art around 1990,” she noted.

Hanging in the kitchen area are several works by “important women artists,” including a feminist piece by Chitra Ganesh, a Brooklyn-based artist of Pakastani-Indian heritage, and a “slightly cartoony” work by San Antonio-based artist Bettie Ward of a woman making love to a cactus.

“I wrote a book about Bettie, so we traded—I did writing, she gave me a piece of art.”

Another fun work in the kitchen is by artist (and mailman) Mark Bennett, who also received a show at the Corcoran Gallery in the 1990s. The colorful pop-culture piece is reminiscent of a 1950s “Leave It to Beaver” scene—except this June Cleaver-esque woman is holding a shotgun.

Pointing to a collection of shoe-themed porcelain plates (a gift from her brother) that hang on a kitchen wall, Ms. Sultan smiled and admitted that she is a “shoe fetist.”

“I own quite a lot of shoes and even keep them catalogued in boxes. I have the entire collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s shoe ornaments, so at Christmas we even put up a special shoe-themed Christmas tree.”

It’s not surprising that paintings and prints by Donald Sultan are showcased on the home’s walls, as are works by her husband. Mr. Sultan is best known for his bold, large-scale treatments of still-life subjects, in which he depicts natural objects using industrial materials and methods. His works are included in the permanent collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

In addition to being a painter, Mr. French—who on the day of the interview was in New York City attending a board meeting for the International Association of Art Critics—is also a curator, arts administrator, art critic and art teacher. His work can be found in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Goethe-Institut, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the National Museum of American Art.

“Christopher is mostly an abstract painter whose work is based on mathematical systems, color progression and a grid structure,” Ms. Sultan explained, adding that after he discovered a discarded book printed in Braille on the streets of New York City in 1986, he took a strong look at the literal and metaphorical use of Braille paper in his work.

“Books are very, very important to us,” she said. “A new book comes into this house almost every day. So once a year we donate books to the library of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. And now we’ll find a library out here.”

Although partial to art books, Ms. Sultan is a “big fiction reader.” One of her favorite authors is the East End’s own Peter Matthiessen, whom she’d love to meet one day.

“When I was in the Peace Corps in Apia, Western Samoa in 1977, I discovered ‘At Play in the Fields of the Lord’ at the local library and have read it at least five times,” she said. “I also like the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, who wrote ‘The Master and Margarita.’”

As for hobbies, Ms. Sultan plays the flute “for fun only,” while Mr. French gardens and is the cook in the family.

“I have a black thumb in both the garden and the kitchen, so I’m very lucky because my husband even loves to shop for groceries,” she said. “In fact, the first thing Christopher did when we moved here was establish his own garden. We have five different kinds of lettuce, radishes, lima beans, green beans, peas, fennel, leeks, broccoli, and some herbs and spices.”

Herself planted—and thriving—on the East End for three months now, Ms. Sultan said she is “probably working harder than she’s ever worked in her life,” but also having a lot of fun “feeling like an ambassador for the Parrish and meeting supportive, welcoming people who are excited about the future of the museum.”

“I’m very motivated to hurry up with the fund-raising effort to get the new building built so we can get back to the real business of art,” she said.

As for her long-term housing goal, she joked that perhaps Herzog & de Meuron could design a dream home for her and Mr. French one day.