The Story Behind This Modernist House Has as Many Twists and Turns as Its Architecture
- The Hamptons home came to be with 22 architect interviews, a scrapped design plan and an untimely death
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Business News/ News / The Story Behind This Modernist House Has as Many Twists and Turns as Its Architecture
When it came to her houses, Julia Reyes Taubman, a Detroit-based philanthropist, photographer and collector, followed her gut, however edgy the results. “She had a fantastically educated but also madcap eye," says Michael Lewis, the Paris-based interior designer who worked with her on several homes. Julie—as she was widely known—“never chose the obvious thing."
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But after years of filling houses with art, Julie decided to build a house that was art. Thus began an exhaustive process in which Julie and her husband, Robert (a real estate mogul known to everyone as Bobby), who owned an oceanfront site on the east end of Long Island, searched for just the right person to design a house there. Already well-versed in contemporary architecture, Julie traveled, read and questioned anyone who might have a suggestion. She ultimately interviewed 22 architects, including several Pritzker Prize winners.
By 2006 Julie had narrowed the list of architects to three, then one. The “winning" architect completed hundreds of pages of construction documents. But in 2008, with contractor Ed Bulgin ready to begin construction, Julie decided the design wasn’t revolutionary enough for her and pulled the plug. Even Bobby was “startled and unhappy with the abruptness of Julie’s decision," Paul Goldberger writes in a new book about the Taubmans’ quest. But she was determined to move forward, and in 2010 her friend Dennis Freedman, a former creative director of W Magazine and Barneys New York, suggested she talk to Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the one firm he believed capable of designing a house that was groundbreaking, but also buildable.
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The New York architects had gone from being radical outsiders to radical insiders in just over a decade. The High Line, which opened in 2009, was their first big splash. Since then they have renovated the Museum of Modern Art, brought Lincoln Center into the 21st Century, created a striking new campus for Columbia Business School and designed a Columbia University Medical Center tower with a serpentine concrete surface that acts as floors, walls and ceilings. And that is just their contribution to the west side of Manhattan. The firm is working all over the world.
With major institutions vying for their services, partners Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio and Charles Renfro had reason to avoid taking on residential projects, which are notoriously time-consuming. (Philip Johnson once told me that he stopped doing houses because the owners, no matter how rich and how sophisticated, would call him in the middle of the night if a faucet started to drip.)
Another reason for Diller and Scofidio to hesitate: the last house they designed, in the 1980s, also for a site on Long Island, was left unfinished after the clients’ plan to raise the money for the house fell through. Called Slow House, it featured a TV screen partially blocking its one big window and showing scenes from outside that window in real time. (Luckily for the architects, Slow House, as much conceptual art as architecture, became a touchstone for architecture students.)
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On top of all that, the Taubmans’ site was “awkward—it was narrow, with lots of height restrictions and major setbacks," Renfro says. Plus, he says, “We knew they had been through several other architects." In her quest to find the right designer, Julie “had almost given up," says Diller. “We were incentivized to turn her around." Renfro, meanwhile, was persuaded, by a mutual friend, that Julie loved architecture enough to make something great happen. The firm signed on.
But the story doesn’t have a happy ending. Julie, who helped found the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, or MOCAD, and was often described as a force of nature, died at age 50 of cancer in 2018, after enjoying only one full summer in the house. That made Blue Dream not part of her life but of her legacy.
The saga is told in the book “Blue Dream and the Legacy of Modernism in the Hamptons" by Goldberger, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic and longtime chronicler of the modernist architecture of eastern Long Island. That gives him the perspective to call Blue Dream a sign that the area—once a hotbed of modernist experimentation—is “again a place in which new and inventive forms of design might flourish."
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The book pairs Goldberger’s words with the architectural photography of Iwan Baan. Baan shot the house in all four seasons, inside and out (even from a helicopter), and says it was “rewarding to depict a place that is so deeply personal to its creator." As to why the book is coming out years after the house was finished, Goldberger says the fault was his—other projects, including books on Frank Gehry (2015) and baseball stadiums (2019), had to come first. And Baan was a perfectionist, Bobby says, waiting for just the right snowfall, just the right sunset. Yet Baan caught a rainbow behind the house—which adorns the book’s front cover—on his iPhone.
Bobby waited for Goldberger and Baan. If his wife wanted the best possible house, he wanted the best possible record of it, Bobby says. “We did the book for Julie."
Over lunch in the house’s glass-walled living room, Bobby describes the effort that went into creating Blue Dream—named for a strain of marijuana favored by Julie’s friend, the author Elmore Leonard, who died in 2013. For the Taubmans, the name had “just the right amount of sauciness, not to say irreverence," Goldberger writes. “Blue Dream" also evokes the house’s ethereal presence at the seashore.
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The design process lasted more than two years, as every decision had to be approved by Julie, Bobby, and Bulgin. Given the house’s irregular shapes, “there was a challenge every time you turned around," Bulgin says. For that reason, the builder couldn’t give the Taubmans a fixed price for much of the job and proceeded, instead, on a cost-plus basis. Construction took about five years. Costs have never been divulged.
Designing handrails that were just right for the house’s stairs required some 150 sketches. And the windows needed 92 pieces of glass, only four of them the same, Bobby says. Himself an experienced builder, he notes that the exterior glass can withstand 185-mile-per-hour winds. Renfro, playing on Le Corbusier’s description of modernist houses as “machines for living," calls Blue Dream “a machine for viewing."
The front door, meanwhile, is its own work of art, a massive sculpture of white bronze with bas reliefs of Julie’s thumbprint on the outside and Bobby’s on the inside, symbolizing the mark each of them made on the house. It took two years for the team to design and fabricate the door and for Polich Tallix (now UAP), a foundry that has worked with many famous artists, to make it. The Taubmans even commissioned a Blue Dream logo that would be used on notepads and linens and on the wooden gate at the foot of their driveway.
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But there was a bigger picture for Renfro to focus on: making sure the house was more than just a house. That was Julie’s ambition and part of his firm’s creed. Beauty alone wouldn’t take it to the level of DS+R’s better-known buildings, which, in Goldberger’s words, “try to go beyond striking visual images to use architecture as a means of exploring social and cultural ideas."
That led to a lot of deep thinking on Renfro’s part. Some works of art, he says, are notable simply for their forms—to be enjoyed and appreciated viscerally. Other artworks make statements, political or otherwise. But the best art, Renfro says, tries to do both.
Renfro tried to give the Taubmans a true work of art—an object both beautiful and meaningful. The house is unmistakably the former, a kind of bubble rising from a dunescape. “It looks like form is its primary issue," says Renfro. “But the form we came up with was determined by ideas."
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Of course that form has precedents—everything from igloos to geodesic domes to Eero Saarinen’s swoopy TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport, a building Julie loved. But unlike some of its predecessors, it makes a statement about the connection between buildings and their settings: The house’s main level rises and falls in concert with the dunes. Stairs aren’t free-standing flights, but are molded into the concrete floors. Says Renfro, “We were mimicking the site, bringing the rolling dunes into and through the house." The ground floor steps up three times, but, thanks to the deployment of stairs as part of the interior landscape, he says, “You hardly notice that you’ve been elevated."
In becoming part of the dunes, Blue Dream goes a step further than the beach houses of the 1950s and 60s, many of which were small and left the existing topography intact. “We consciously tried to bring the beach modernism of mid century into the 21st," Renfro says. And that meant making the house, if not tiny, compact. At about 8,000 square feet, Goldberger writes, it satisfied Julie’s preference for a house that would appear modest compared with the behemoths flanking it on one of East Hampton’s most desirable beaches.
Blue Dream also makes a statement about the intimacy of family life. Even with four children, Julie wanted spaces to flow into each other, often without doors. So Renfro used level changes to create privacy. Some spaces, including Julie and Bobby’s bedroom, are raised above the main level; others, like the kids’ rooms, are tucked below. But there are exceptions to the no-door policy: Julie wanted to enclose Bobby’s study, because he was sometimes loud when talking business on the phone. (Bobby concurs.) That study, doorless or not, is one of the house’s triumphs. An astonishingly complex, braided cashmere rug by New York’s Dana Barnes almost steals the show. But from his Vladimir Kagan chair at his Maarten Baas desk, Bobby can see both the house’s lush entry court to the north and the vast expanse of ocean to the south.
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The house also makes a statement about architecture’s dependence on technology. For nearly two years, the Taubmans, Renfro, Bulgin and others looked for a way to make Blue Dream’s roof light enough to seemingly float over the house. Concrete, which is heavy, would have necessitated interior columns. Eventually, the group came up with the idea of making the roof out of foam panels covered in fiberglass. After talking to boat builders in the northeast, Bulgin learned of a firm near Seattle that made prototype wings for military aircraft and hulls of America’s Cup racing yachts.
The roof became, structurally, just like a giant surfboard. But while a surfboard can fit on the roof of a car, the roof of Blue Dream had to be shipped from Washington state on 27 flatbed trucks. At the site, the pieces were hoisted onto elaborate scaffolds, then joined with additional fiberglass. Resembling a potato chip to some, the roof is supported not on columns but by swooping down (or as Renfro puts it, “kissing the floor") at several points. Using foam—technically polyethylene terephthalate, which was made in Belgium from recycled plastic water bottles—instead of concrete reduced the overall weight of the house by 220 tons, or approximately 2/3, according to Bulgin.
The house also makes a statement about the ability of modernism to coexist with copious amounts of furniture and art. Unlike many modernist houses, which are almost furniture-free (or become so when the architect’s chosen photographer arrives), Blue Dream is stuffed with pieces Julie loved. “If there is one tenet of modernism that the house rejects completely," Goldberger writes, “it is the notion of minimalism. It is almost baroque in its complexity."
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Designer Michael Lewis, who joined the team in 2014, commissioned many items on Julie’s behalf, and picked out others in her storage space in Michigan. That space, filled with things Julie hadn’t yet found—or built—a home for, had become “a kind of accidental museum of 20th-Century design," Goldberger writes. In the case of Blue Dream, Lewis worked not from plans, which couldn’t capture the complexity of the spaces, he says, but from visiting and experiencing the rooms. In the end, he says, there are hardy any tables or chairs in the house with four corner legs. Why? “This isn’t a linear house," he says. “I used design to amplify the architecture."
Among the most prominent objects are two dining tables by Joseph Walsh, a consummate craftsman best known for creating swoopy pieces of wooden furniture at his studio outside Cork, Ireland. In this case, Julie wanted a large indoor table and an outdoor table big enough to seat 44, and she wanted Walsh to make them out of stone. The outdoor table was carved from rock extracted from the Joyce family quarry in County Galway, chosen by Walsh because its Connemara green marble is, he says, “vivid, rich and varied." The slab Walsh needed, he says, was so large that the engineering firm Ove Arup oversaw the extraction, injecting resin into the marble so it wouldn’t break as it was cut and lifted. He also designed an olive ash headboard for Julie and Bobby’s bedroom, and wood handles for several of the house’s internal glass doors, including one to Bobby’s study.
The chairs around Walsh’s marble dining table are also art. Julie, according to Goldberger, admired Eero Saarinen not just for his architecture but also for his furniture, including his iconic Tulip chairs. But buying chairs at Design Within Reach wasn’t how Julie did things. Allergic to clichés, when she imagined using Eero Saarinen Tulip chairs, she also wondered what she could do to make each chair distinctive. She enlisted the furniture-morphing artist Chris Schanck. He cut holes of different sizes and positions into the backs of 44 vintage Saarinen chairs, then coated them in a carbon fiber fabric with a flocked surface. Each chair is, Goldberger points out, a unique, handcrafted object, “both a Schanck and a Saarinen."
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One of the living room’s most startling pieces is an array of yellow seating by the Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen, which Julie purchased in Beijing. Called Life Raft, it consists of seats upholstered in found fabrics, bound to each other by metal tubes and intended to evoke the experience of immigrants pressing together. Next to it is a sofa by Brazil’s Campana Brothers, its back made of bamboo and its seat of the skin of a very large fish, the pirarucu, for which the piece is named. It faces a glass and marble coffee table, a prototype by the Australian-born designer Marc Newson.
Julie also commissioned table and floor lamps, some by accomplished artists. “Light reflected off the ceiling is the best," Bobby says. “It creates an ambient glow that makes people feel better and in this case accentuates the curves of the house." In the end, the house would have only one hanging light, a 350-pound white bronze chandelier that its creator, sculptor Darcy Miro, has compared with a meteor.
Julie herself was something of a meteor, a bright light visible only for an instant. But the result of her efforts survives. As Goldberger writes, “The ambitions of the clients drove the architects; the ambitions of the architects drove the clients. They occasionally irritated each other, but they more often inspired each other." Says Renfro, “The house never would have been what it is without Julie."
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