BOB Weinstein was happy in Sag Harbor, in the little gray house on
Suffolk Street he had owned for a decade. It was a quiet second home on a
lot thick with old-growth trees, away from the busiest parts of the
roughly 260-year-old former whaling village on the South Fork of Long Island, but a short walk from a downtown lined with restaurants and small shops.
Bob Weinstein (in print shirt at far right) and Eric Hensley prepared for Mr. Hensley’s birthday party.
He was so happy, in fact, that he and his longtime partner, Eric
Hensley, got used to making the two-hour drive out to Sag Harbor every
weekend, all year long, and sometimes when they only had one night —
though they already lived in a 5,600-square-foot loft in the Chelsea
neighborhood of Manhattan, where Mr. Weinstein also runs a brand positioning and graphic design company.
Both
dwellings were furnished in the same style: sleekly modern, full of
mid-20th-century modernist furniture picked up over the years at
auctions, antique stores, the 26th Street flea market in Manhattan and
yard sales in Sag Harbor.
There were tables and settees from names like Florence
Knoll and George Nelson in the Sag Harbor house, a basement studio
where Mr. Weinstein produced monoprint artwork and a sun-drenched room
off the back for weekend relaxing.
“I think we really live here,”
Mr. Hensley, 40, a former fashion stylist who now works as a flight
attendant, said on a mild recent Saturday in the village. “It could be
snowing, it could be raining — we’re always here.”
Friends who
knew the home the couple had made for themselves amid the house’s clean,
quiet lines, were surprised by what Mr. Weinstein — who is not the film
producer of the same name — did next. He bought another house down the
block, spending more than $2 million on a rambling old homestead on a
nearly one-acre lot with low ceilings and a picket fence that had been
in the same family for four generations.
Built in the mid-1700s
with a series of additions that began about a century later, the house,
on the corner of Suffolk and Jefferson Streets, came on the market when
the previous owner, a 100-year-old woman who was born there, died. Mr.
Weinstein and Mr. Hensley, it turned out, had been curious about the
place for years, eyeing it on their way toward Main Street, or on walks
with their grayish-black terrier, Spencer.
“We’d walk along that
long white fence and sort of slow down, peer into the property through
the overgrown boxwoods,” Mr. Weinstein recalled, “and we’d catch a
glimpse of the old chicken coop, the old carriage house, walk by the old
hitching post, and we’d just sort of wonder about its history, all the
things that may have happened during the centuries of people living in
that house.”
So, ever the antiques collector, Mr. Weinstein
pounced. “I just knew it would be very hard for me to have never done
this project, and to have been on Suffolk Street, and walking by all the
time,” he said, wincing a bit at the thought.
Mr. Weinstein,
whose wry smile and athletic frame make him look younger than his 49
years, said this while perched on a stool under a newly vaulted ceiling
and near a hanging 1960s Swedish light fixture made of spun aluminum.
But
amid these and other modern touches, like the new saltwater Gunite
pool, other details are meant to keep the house grounded in the past:
there are still 150-year-old boxwoods outside, most of the original
windows and moldings remain, and a rosewood Saarinen table rests on
150-year-old floorboards, some as wide as 20 inches, that were bleached
and refinished to a pale white.
A massive wooden cabinet that once
held a previous owner’s law files — “It had little index cards with
thumbtacks hanging: ‘Foreclosures, A to B,’ ” Mr. Weinstein said — is
now a dresser in the hall outside the main bedroom. In the mud room
downstairs, a coat rack was salvaged from the carriage house, where Mr.
Weinstein believes it may have once held saddles.
While the house
retains a sense of its history, though, it has also been transformed
into something loftlike — not what it was, but not quite what Mr.
Weinstein’s other places are either. It is bright inside, even on a
cloudy afternoon, and open: Mr. Weinstein likes to position visitors at a
few strategic locations and tell them to look right and left, where
they can see all the way from one end of the house to the other.
“I
think 10 years of sharp minimalism made me feel that maybe it’s time to
let loose a little bit,” he said, adding that, as always, part of the
appeal was the challenge. “I wanted to see if I could take my eye and
blend my midcentury furniture into a setting that is midcentury — but
mid-18th century.”
Mr. Weinstein started planning the renovation,
in fact, in the spring of 2005, long before the sale was complete, using
a methodology called “Image Architecture”
that his company, Concrete Brand Imaging Group, developed to help
clients define their brand identities. In a briefing for his architect,
Mr. Weinstein highlighted the emotional and cultural factors involved in
his purchase and transformation of the property.
AN
FRANCISCANS have long ducked off Highway 29 to wait out the traffic
with a stroll through one of downtown Napa's neighborhoods of wide
streets, airy parks and gingerbread-style houses. But lately, there's
been reason to linger a bit longer in this once sleepy town at the stem
of the Napa Valley wine country. With hip eateries, a contemporary art
museum on the revitalized riverfront and a 19th-century opera house now
featuring a series of world music performances, downtown Napa has become
a destination in its own right. Behind some of the oldest stone
storefronts in California you can discover the newest flavor
combinations, with-it clothing stores, and a sense that you've found
something hidden, something on the verge of a boom.
