In a town famous for sprawling estates, the clients requested a house just large enough to accommodate their family, in a unique 1950?s development of modest cottages set among rolling dunes, a few hundred feet from the ocean. Local lore says that the dramatic landscape was once used as a film location for desert scenes in silent movies.

Courtesy of Bates Masi Architects

Architects: Bates Masi Architects · Office Profile

Location: Amagansett, NY, USA

Collaborators: Paul Masi, Harry Bates, Daniel Widlowski

Project Year: 2015

Photographs: Courtesy of Bates Masi Architects

Courtesy of Bates Masi Architects

From the architect. In a town famous for sprawling estates, the clients requested a house just large enough to accommodate their family, in a unique 1950?s development of modest cottages set among rolling dunes, a few hundred feet from the ocean. Local lore says that the dramatic landscape was once used as a film location for desert scenes in silent movies.
Site Plan

The clients? small lot backs up to a preserve, where the forms of windswept trees and dunes record the intensity and direction of the constant coastal wind. The wind scours the sand from around the scruffy vegetation, dragging it into crescent shaped parabolic dunes that point in the direction of the prevailing westerly wind. In the s...