Project: Amagansett Dunes House
Architects: Bates Masi Architects
Location: Amagansett, NY, USA
Area: 1,725 sq ft
Photographs by: Courtesy of Bates Masi Architects
Amagansett Dunes House by Bates Masi Architects
When a family approached Bates Masi Architects with a request to design their home, the architects knew exactly what to do.
Their work resulted in a home just large enough to make the family comfortable. The Amagansett Dunes residence is located within a 1950s neighborhood of modest cottages in Amagansett, New York. It is set just a few hundred feet from the ocean.
From the architects: ”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.”
From the architects: “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 same way that the landscape is formed by the microclimate, so too is the house.”
From the architects: “The house is oriented to face the street, the afternoon sun, and the prevailing wind. The entire west and east facades are comprised of operable glass, with small adjustable openings on the windward west side and expansive openings on the leeward east side. The difference in opening sizes creates a pressure differential across the house that promotes natural ventilation. The large doors on the east side open onto decks overlooking the parabolic dunes.”
