From the tree-lined road shading houses of different historic styles in a picturesque village on Long Island’s South Shore, a freestanding study for an art historian looks quite unprepossessing. The cottage, which also includes a film-screening area for her husband, a businessman, is nestled at the rear of a grassy 2.2-acre property. Although it is difficult to see the studio from the street past the trees and the vegetable garden, the studio’s prowlike front hardly resembles the American residential architecture surrounding it. A discreet but unfamiliar-looking object, the studio’s angular walls and sloped roof, both clad in copper, converge on a tall, narrow door some 12 feet in height.
As it turns out, however, this retreat is actually more like a tree house than a cottage: Entering the small, high vestibule, one immediately confronts a narrow wood stair leading up to the second-level work space. At the rear of this loftlike expanse, the historian’s desk looks out through a 16-by-7-foot window directly onto a grove of trees with a stream in the near distance.
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