'Hamptons Modern' Book Explores the Warmth and Artistry of Modern Architecture

A variety of newer and newly renovated modern homes on the North and South Forks, long a proving ground for modern architecture, are featured in “Hamptons Modern: Contemporary Living on the East End,” architecture and design writer David Sokol’s book published last month by The Monacelli Press.

The book mixes homes by Bates Masi + Architects, Young Projects, Leroy Street Studio, Ryall Sheridan Architects and other renowned architecture firms of today with 20th century houses by modernist masters Andrew Geller, Charles Gwathmey and Norman Jaffe that have been updated and expanded in ways that complement the original designs. Sokol’s words accompany images by top architecture photographers, and the book includes a few interviews he conducted as well.

During an interview last week, Sokol acknowledged he has never lived on the East End, though it’s an area he has long been familiar with.

“I spent most of my adult life in the Hudson Valley and I spent most of my growing up — all of my growing up actually — on Long Island,” Sokol said. He lived in Nassau County then, and while his family was not “a Hamptons family,” he said, he recalled taking off-season trips to the East End to pick apples or see the windmills.

Sokol and his husband, Richard East, now live in an 18th century stone house in the Hudson Valley that they are currently renovating. The region was the subject of his 2018 book, “Hudson Modern,” which he said is very much in the same vein as “Hamptons Modern.”

Both books include 18 houses, each by different architects, and three Q&As.

“Originally, the idea of the Q&A was just to sort of syncopate the rhythm of the reading experience,” Sokol said, but what started out as a pacing device has taken on more meaning than that. “House projects are such personal endeavors, and people I speak to do have such love and respect for the place,” he added.

He conducted the “Hamptons Modern” Q&As with Timothy Godbold, an interior designer and the founder of preservation advocacy group Hamptons 20 Century Modern; Nick Martin of architecture studio Martin Architects and construction firm 4MA Builders in Sagaponack, who has done preservation work on Gwathmey houses; and Clay and Margot Coffey, the founders of Isaac-Rae, an architecture and design studio in Greenport.

Sokol said he included Isaac-Rae to make sure there was a younger voice in the book.

“There aren’t too many OGs in this book,” Sokol said. “There isn’t Barnes Coy or Fred Stelle, but still, it was leaning a little more toward mid-career architects. So I wanted there to be a younger voice and also because I felt the younger voice would be a little more focused on the future — because they’re going to be around on the East End longer than the rest of us.”

The architects and designers interviewed in the Q&As do not belong to the 18 architecture firms that are behind the homes featured in the book. “The images that accompany those Q&As show off the interviewees’ work, but there’s a lot of great work and a lot of great talent out there, and I just wanted to make sure that most people got equal airtime,” Sokol said.

To narrow down his initial list of modern homes to just 18 took some work. He said there is an embarrassment of riches out east when it comes to houses to choose from.

When he first started making his list in spring 2018, he reached 100 houses really quickly, he recalled. “So you start making decisions about what you want to stand for. The act of curating is not exactly agnostic,” he said. “So a lot of the decisions came down to size. I didn’t really didn’t want any houses that were over 3,000 square feet.”

There are exceptions to that size cap, but few.

“I was looking for projects that really legibly related to landscape,” Sokol said. “I wasn’t looking for spectacles that were just for spectacle sake. I was really hoping for human-scale projects that really express love for the land and the place.”

That means houses that were in dialogue with the landscape, he explained, though he noted it’s not all about “puppy dogs and hugs.” For example, he pointed out that the house on the cover was designed to take into account a potential natural disaster so it has the ability for water to run underneath it in case of a storm surge or exceptional high tide.

“Whether it’s romanticist vision of the landscape or much more practical view of the landscape, these are all houses that are truly in dialogue with site and nature — ecosystem,” he said. “And many also express a dialogue with the place in terms of historical building methods or historical forms.”

Sokol disabused readers of the notion that the book contains the “most expensive, most outrageous” homes, and he also suggested the book will change the minds of those who think modernism is “a little sleek and cold.”

“Leafing through the pages will show you a warmth and a genuine feeling for the Hamptons that sometimes the region doesn’t get credit for in the media,” he said. “… The legacy of artistry and creation and community is all there, and it’s not just expressed in the people who own these homes, but actually in the physical artifacts of the homes.”

Most of the homeowners agreed to be named, Sokol pointed out, and he takes that as a sign that these houses are the kind of work he was looking for when he planned the book. These homeowners are proud, not in the sense of building a house for the sake of status or showing off, but they love the place and feel authentically about the East End, he said.

Regarding exceptions to the 3,000-square-foot cap he has loosely imposed, Sokol said there is a 10,000-square-foot house in the book because he wanted to celebrate the talent of the architect Audrey Matlock. “She’s just a brilliant architect who deserves to be celebrated,” he added.

And there was another reason to pick it: “Sometimes you have to throw in a whopper of a house because it has a different sense of materiality. You just kind of want to shake the reader, be like, ‘Hey, you still paying attention?’”

The house on the cover is also a bit of an exception, even though it otherwise fits the book’s theme very well. It’s named Wetlands House, by Manhattan-based Ryall Sheridan Architects, and it’s actually in Orient, at the tip of the North Fork and overlooking Peconic Bay, rather than in the Hamptons.

“In a way I like it because the Hamptons can be almost a frame of mind, and there’s also a lot of movement of weekenders outside the Hamptons hamlets and towns proper,” Sokol said. “The geographic scope of the book is really Orient, Montauk, all the way to Bellport.”

Wetlands House is raised up on concrete piers that were deliberately shaped and placed, he pointed out.

“They’re not just sticking out of the ground,” he said. “Instead of just being posts, they’re sort of long, rectilinear. They’re more wedge-like, the way that they’re drawn out, and they’re not placed in a rigid row. They’re kind of scattered here and there. So it’s one of the things I love about this house. Elements that are almost incidental were actually designed with the same care as the more primary spaces.”

He praised architect William Ryall for advocating that the house be lifted up for “incredibly practical reasons” and for his execution. “He did it so poetically — I love it,” Sokol said.

Sokol was an American studies major as an undergraduate student at Yale University and said he thought he was going to become a professor of Methodist history. In fact, the first work he ever published was about an 1872 Methodist campground in Shelter Island Heights, where a preacher converted people up on stage.

But then in his sophomore year, as he was working out his “academic angst,” he said, he came across an architecture magazine. “I thought it was really sexy, and I didn’t understand a word of it, and I was kind of hooked from that day on,” he said. “Even starting as an undergrad, I got internships at magazines, and I have literally been writing about buildings almost since day one.”

Sokol said he had pitched “Hudson Modern” for years and got a lot of rejection, but then The Monacelli Press got a new editorial director, Alan Rapp, who wanted to do regional surveys. “I happened to be the first one who spoke to him about it,” Sokol said. And now Monacelli has similar books on the Rocky Mountains, Texas, etc.

When Rapp offered Sokol the opportunity to do another book, he decided on a Hamptons book because, he said, he hadn’t seen a book like the one he wanted to do since Paul Goldberger’s “The Houses of the Hamptons” of 1986. “So it felt like time,” he said.

Sokol noted that he loves all historical eras, but he guesses the reason he landed on modernism as a subject goes back to that magazine he found in sophomore year of college. “It was modernist in bent, and I felt a greater kinship with that than the more neotraditional things that were being shown in like Architectural Digest at the time,” he said.

It also helped the community of writers and editors welcome him.

“Sometimes you don’t really — you can’t really — chart your own path,” Sokol said. “Sometimes it finds its way to you.”

Sokol also worked on last year’s monograph for Wordstead, the Brooklyn interior design firm that worked on the renovation of Canoe Place Inn in Hampton Bays, and he co-wrote “The Modern Architecture Pop-Up Book,” published in 2008. Next, he’s planning “Catskills Modern.”

David Sokol will sign “Hamptons Modern: Contemporary Living on the East End” on Saturday, November 12, from 3 to 5 p.m. at Sylvester & Co. Modern General, 103 Main Street, Sag Harbor.