When Jerome Engelking’s in-laws asked him to design a vacation home on a wooded plot of land in Amagansett, on Long Island, he found it the perfect opportunity to do what he thinks any architect would dream of doing: build a glass house. “The site spoke to the idea,” he says. “It was virgin land—I didn’t want to whack everything down and make some big, formal statement.” But first, he had to convince the in-laws, who had some concerns about privacy. According to the French-born Engelking, who is a senior associate at Richard Meier + Partners Architects, his father-in-law came around after seeing pictures of Philip Johnson’s Wiley House in Connecticut. “He liked the idea of looking at nature rather than walls,” says the architect. What he didn’t like, however, was the idea of steel, which he found too austere. Being from Austria, he and his wife wanted a warm and casual setting for spending summers with their adult children and eight grandkids, all based in New York. So Engelking proposed an all-timber structure.