DESIGNER SHOWCASE
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AN ARCHITECT CREATES A SUSTAINABLE FAMILY HOUSE IN GREENPORT FOR A TOUGH CUSTOMER. HIMSELF. BY KATYA RUSSELL PHOTOGRAPHS BY LIZ GLASGOW
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ayne Turett, the founder and principal of the New York City-based Turett Collaborative Architects TCA, has been known to design apartments with a fair amount of razzle-dazzle. He once installed a curved stainless
steel slide in an East Village duplex. Another time he accompanied the owner of an Upper East Side condo to a town high in the Swiss Alps in search of a stone destined for a thirty-foot-high interior wall. Yet it wasn’t until a few years ago that Turett finally created a home of his own. The project began when he chanced upon a piece of land for sale in Greenport. Turett is a committed sailor and he and his wife had kept a weekend retreat in that town for years. On learning that the nearly half-acre property stretched all the way down to the water and had its own dock, he made an offer without delay. It was 2014 and although he didn’t know it at the time, he would spend the next four years working on the project in fits and starts during time carved out of his architecture practice. Designing an apartment building or drawing up plans for a gut renovation is one thing; creating a house from the ground up is quite another. Houses, Turett notes, have a special appeal for architects ‘because they are like sculptures.’ Indeed, the interior of the 2,400-square-foot two-story and cellar structure has a sculptural quality. Tellingly, it has no razzle-dazzle whatsoever. ‘My personal taste runs toward the minimal,’ says Turett, who imbued the house with a Scandinavian aesthetic. That sense of style comes through in his design choices, in the oiled wide-plank pine floors, in the palette
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