"When we met our clients,” recalls Hamptons-based architect Kevin O’Sullivan, “we had no idea that they had a spectacular collection of modern art.” And his clients had no idea that the man they were trusting to design their four-bedroom home had once been accepted to pursue painting and sculpture at the prestigious Edinburgh College of Art in his native Scotland.
O’Sullivan met his clients in 2010, when he and his husband, businessman Jim Thomas, briefly put their 10,000-square-foot Amagansett home, which O’Sullivan designed, on the market. “She came in with her husband,” the architect recalls, “completely glamorous, dressed all in Prada. We just called her the Prada Lady after that.” Two years after the men had taken the house off the market, the Prada Lady and her husband offered to buy it, but the couple had already agreed to sell the sprawling modern home to someone who knocked on the door and made an offer they couldn’t refuse. “So I said, ‘Why don’t you let me design a house for you?’” O’Sullivan recalls. He knew just the place for it, a two-acre plot right around the corner.
Working with colleagues Luke Ferran, an architect originally from Southampton, and Anastasia Ovtchinnikova, an interior designer who was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, O’Sullivan began creating a site plan for the house, slated for the top of a knoll. “I love a hilly location,” O’Sullivan says. “It makes it easier to cut up the volumes of a house and avoid that monster McMansion look.” Known for bringing the outdoors into his projects, he also considered the surrounding landscape, which includes 420 acres of adjacent reserve. “In the Hamptons, outdoor rooms are a way of life. It’s something I got very accustomed to while I was working in Asia after university.”
O’Sullivan made deft use of materials to minimize the transitions between the various volumes. “The pool deck and the floor of the adjacent interior rooms are both travertine,” he explains, noting that it’s his favorite flooring, in this case “filled for the interior and unfilled for the exterior, which makes it less slippery underfoot.”
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