A Perfect Fit

The couple who live in this Stonington, Connecticut, house were used to moving. At various times they’d had houses in Fairfield County and the New York suburbs as well as a pied-à-terre in Brooklyn. They even lived for a time on their sailboat. In fact, it was while sailing along the Connecticut shore that they first became enchanted with the colonial village of Stonington. “We were sailing around here in 1997 and came into the village and, within a few days, had bought a summer house here,” the wife recalls.

Village life was fine for a vacation house, but when they decided to make Stonington their year-round home, they wanted a bit more privacy. And, after years of fitting themselves to houses other people had built, they felt it was time to start from scratch. “I’d always wanted to build a house—I like having things that actually work,” the homeowner says with a laugh.

The couple knew they wanted to work with Oz Maile, a New York–based designer who had done the interiors for several of their homes over the years, but finding an architect was something of a challenge. “We interviewed quite a few people,” the homeowner says. “But in every case, none of them did work that quite spoke to me.”

That all changed when she and her husband made a visit to the offices of Jim Estes and Peter Twombly in Newport, Rhode Island. “I immediately loved everything I saw on their walls,” she says. “I loved that Yankee modern look. There was just no distant second.”

Her instructions to Twombly were simple. “I told Peter, ‘We want lots of light, we want to let nature in. How you do it is up to you.’ ”

She also told him the couple preferred something on the smaller side. “We have an exquisite piece of property, and we wanted to do as little violence to it as possible,” she says. “Some people would build a 9,000-square-foot house, but we didn’t want any more than we need for the two of us.”

Twombly faced a few challenges of his own. The seven-acre parcel sits between a nature preserve and Fisher’s Island Sound, making for plenty of privacy and unbeatable views. But wetlands preservation laws meant only a tiny portion of the land, about 6 percent, was usable. “We ended up with this funny-shaped buildable lot,” Twombly says. “I started thinking about European hill towns and how they ended up as walled areas with fairly concentrated construction.”

With that model in mind, Twombly designed a cluster of buildings—the main house, a garage and a barn where the husband indulges his passion for working on the couple’s boat—and tied them together with a series of walls built from local fieldstone. The main house is further divided, with a glassed-in breezeway separating the living areas from the master bedroom. A second, open breezeway forms a connector to the garage. Twombly used metal roofing with deep overhangs, and a combination of shingles and siding. “As you come up to the house, you see the shingled side and the big windows,” he notes. “The bedroom side reads as much more private, with its siding and its smaller windows.”

The house, which is a bit more than 3,000 square feet, feels both spacious and cozy inside. “It’s a very open house, but it’s also very private,” the homeowner says.

In every corner, wraparound windows (with motorized shades) frame the natural world outside, offering views of woods and wetlands on three sides and marshland and the sound on the fourth. “It’s hard even to describe what the view from our bedroom is like,” the homeowner says. “It’s unobstructed. We see wild turkeys and deer, we have an eagle on the property. We look out on a marsh and wildflowers and the crystal-blue sea. It’s very hard to get up in the morning!”

Interior designer Maile began with the home’s lighting plan. “There are probably two hundred lights in the house,” he says, carefully placed to highlight the couple’s collection of art and fine crafts.

Maile designed much of the furniture in the house, using the architecture’s Arts and Crafts influence as inspiration. “I wanted to respect the house, yet at the same time not just stick with the same note or dimension,” he says. “When the furniture is too close a match to the house, you don’t get that extra element.”

He also wanted to make sure the furniture was scaled to fit the spacious interior. “It’s hard to find furniture that’s scaled up properly for a great room,” he says. For the great room’s dining area, for example, he designed chairs that have a little more heft than most. “A typically thin-legged chair would look sort of scrawny,” he says. He gave the chairs further weight by upholstering them in a Bergamo fabric with the stripe running horizontally instead of vertically. The color scheme in the great room takes its cue from the large stone fireplace and the hues of the sea outside, with fabrics in shades of teal and brown and a variety of textures.

The homeowner’s penchant for efficiency over extravagance shows in the kitchen. As stylish as it is, with it oak cabinets accented with stainless steel pulls, its gray-green granite counters and a glass-tile backsplash, it’s compact compared with the oversize kitchen so popular in houses these days. “I’m a very neat, organized cook,” the homeowner says. “It’s a very easy working kitchen, meant to cook in, not hang around in.”

The home’s upstairs, reached via a staircase of oak and stainless steel with a subtle nautical feel, holds a guest room and a combined guest room and study.

Her new house, the homeowner says, is just what she and her husband wanted: highly crafted yet simple and uncluttered. “Peter built us an absolutely perfect house,” she says, “for the site and for us.”

Architecture: Peter Twombly, Estes/Twombly
Interior design: Oz Maile, Design Site
Builder: Robert D. Wood