East Hampton Pool Pavilion

Wainscott, New York

The site of the project, a residential landscape and pool pavilion, boarders one of the many protected agriculture reserves in the East Hampton area. The landscape plan, designed by collaborators Reed Hilderbrand Landscape Architecture, reorients the site and opens the view toward the reserve in the southeast, allowing a release to a distant view.

The pool pavilion anchors the northwest corner and then dissolves into the site, serving as an occupiable edge from which to view and contemplate the landscape. The building negotiates the eastern edge of the bluestone pool terrace which drops off six-and-a-half feet to the tennis court below. The stone of the terrace folds up at the north side of the pavilion, terminating the space of the terrace and focusing the space outward. The pavilion’s main room becomes an extension of the terrace through folding and sliding glass doors, housed against the mass of the wall when open.

A stone stair to the tennis courts wraps down in a clockwise direction around the pavilion between the stone wall and a bathroom structure to the north. A balcony, cantilevering over the tennis court below, creates a bench where it enters the pavilion, a hovering viewing platform at the court’s edge, and the first landing of the counter-clockwise ascent from the terrace to a light metal and wood stair reaching the roof terrace floating above. The roof terrace offers views both to the ocean beyond the reserve and to the sunset to the west of the main house.