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For a famous musician who spends more than 200 days a year performing concerts around the globe and sleeping in a different hotel bed every night, the idea of coming home is a very comforting thought.
Such is the case for Grammy-nominated jazz pianist Judy Carmichael, one of the world’s leading interpreters of stride piano and swing, and producer/host of the National Public Radio show, “Jazz Inspired,” which is broadcast on more than 170 stations throughout North America. The highly-regarded show, also broadcast on NPR NOW on Sirius/XM Satellite Radio, features interviews with such diverse jazz lovers as Robert Redford and E.L. Doctorow.
Since moving to New York in the early 1980s, Ms. Carmichael has maintained a busy concert schedule that has taken her to such exotic locales as India, Portugal, Brazil and Singapore. In 1992, she was the first jazz musician sponsored by the United States government to tour China.
“I love touring around the world, but home to me is Sag Harbor. It’s the perfect combination of small town friendliness and international sophistication,” said the California native, fresh back from concerts in Italy, Greece, Turkey and Australia to promote her latest CD, “Come and Get It,” which marks her recorded singing debut.
A full-time resident of Sag Harbor since 1992, the pianist had been renting in the area for five years when she announced to friends at a dinner party that she “wanted to find a small house that no one else will buy.”
“I figured I could afford that,” said Ms. Carmichael, who at the time also owned an apartment in Manhattan. “And someone said, ‘I know just the house.’”
And that’s how Ms. Carmichael found her dream house: a 600-square-foot, two-bedroom, one-bath house (all of 20 feet wide), built in the 1940s and located not far from Long Beach.
“I call it my little shack,” she said lovingly.
Today the exterior looks like a charming English cottage, with overflowing pots of flowers and a front door painted an elegant British green, but back then it was rundown and had been vacant for two years.
In addition to needing a new roof and driveway, the outdated house needed many cosmetic improvements, including a new kitchen and upgrading of a “bathroom that had cheesy blue tiles that were peeling off the wall.”
“But I knew it had great bones, and it was on three-quarters of an acre, which is rare for this neighborhood,” said Ms. Carmichael, who bought the house for $175,000.
As renovation work kicked into full gear, the musician said she began hearing from repairmen, “Oh, you bought the old Charlie Balth house.”
“Apparently anyone who has lived out here for a very long time knows who Charlie Balth was. He also built the house next door,” she said.
An acknowledged “architecture groupie” who “knows what she likes” in home design, Ms. Carmichael hatched an idea that she believed would open up the tiny rooms and let more light in.
“I decided to knock down the wall connecting the second bedroom to the hallway. Before I started, I called an old sweetheart—an architect I lived with—and asked if the house would fall down. He said it wouldn’t, so I got out my hammer and started swinging away,” she laughed, tossing back her blonde curls. “I was surprised to find studs that were 2-by-3 instead of 2-by-4 and walls made of plywood and drywall.”
Instead of tearing down the entire wall, however, she decided to leave the studs intact, painting them and the electrical wiring and outlet a stark white.
“Some people still ask when I’m going to finish it, but most people get it and think it’s a cool idea,” said the musician, who did the same thing on the wall that leads from the small entryway into the living room.
While Ms. Carmichael mostly relied on her own design instincts in decorating the house, she also credited her friend, Jason Wilhoite of Sticks and Stalks, for suggesting a warm Benjamin Moore paint palette and creative ways to maximize space.
“It was Jason’s idea to place the French country pine table from my loft in the city in the entryway. Now it serves as a place for books, desk space when I wander around with my laptop, and a place for Samson, my 21-pound “Mancoon,” [also known as a Maine Coon] cat, to hang out,” she said.
Also on the pine table is a whimsical iron frog from Bali that holds up a round bowl for storing easy-to-lose keys and sunglasses.
“The frog always makes me laugh when I walk in the door because he has this look that says, ‘Judy, I am here to serve,’” she said.
Because space is at a premium, Ms. Carmichael has incorporated large baskets, furniture with hidden storage space, and built-ins wherever possible.
“It’s important to keep things really clean, organized and neat when a house is this small,” she said.
The front room is a showplace for several of the musician’s most prized possessions, most notably a 7-foot Steinway “B” piano in a walnut finish that just fits in the 10-foot-by-20-foot space.
“As a professional musician, I’m used to Steinways being black, but now I like the lighter finish,” she said, sitting down at the piano and tickling the ivories.
Acoustically, the room is “amazingly good,” she said. The pine flooring throughout the house (painted a midnight blue) helps, but eventually she would like to open up the ceiling and add a skylight “to make the acoustics in here bigger.”
Hanging on the wall behind the piano is Ms. Carmichael’s “real pride and joy,” an almost 6-foot-by-7-foot framed Italian movie poster from the 1951 Alfred Hitchcock movie “Strangers on a Train.”
“I’m a real Hitchcock fan and this is one of my favorite movies. It was a gift from graphic designer Mike Schell and producer Michael O’Reilly. I was at their lovely house in East Hampton and saw this poster, and another one that’s now in my kitchen, in their garage and just went nuts over them,” she said. “The next day they generously called and offered to give them to me. I just love the impact of this gigantic poster in this small room.”
Ms. Carmichael said she even chose the room’s color, Benjamin Moore’s Sandy Hook Gray, to complement the colors in the poster.
Other accents in the living area include an antique bed that serves as a bench and storage cabinet for sweaters; a huge hydrangea and tree branch display from Sag Harbor Florist (owner Annie Lavinio is a longtime supporter of “Jazz Inspired”); bookcases filled with Edith Wharton, Baum’s “Oz” series, Huck Finn and C.S. Lewis titles; and a Turkish rug which Ms. Carmichael purchased with a small inheritance she received when her mother died.
The front room leads to a narrow hallway flanked by the bathroom and two bedrooms. The mostly white bathroom has a black-and-white checkerboard floor and a miniature-sized sink salvaged from a Sag Harbor junkyard.
Noticeable in the hallway floor is a huge heating grate that serves as the only heat source in the house. Although oil now warms the house, Ms. Carmichael said an old coal-burning furnace was under the vintage grate when she bought the house.
“The heat really shoots out. When it’s freezing outside, I’ll get out of the shower and stand over the grate,” she said. “I hung hooks on the wall above the grate so I can warm up guests’ coats in the winter.”
Ms. Carmichael’s pretty bedroom is painted a mustard color called Concord Ivory. Filling the small room is an ornate brass bed, topped with a colorful patchwork quilt, which the musician purchased when she was 21.
“The bed seemed a huge amount of money to spend at that age, but my old boyfriend said, ‘Buy it, you’ll have it forever,’ and he was right,” she said.
Opposite the bedroom is the second bedroom (with the knocked down “stud” walls) which Ms. Carmichael uses as her office. A wall of built-in bookcases offers storage for the hundreds of books, photos, mementos from her many travels, a VCR, and a vintage-looking television.
“I don’t watch TV, but my friends gave me this when I started being featured on shows like Entertainment Tonight and CBS’s ‘Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt’ and with Charles Osgood,” she said.
The hallway opens up to a galley kitchen, which has a Mexican tile floor and is painted a warm Kingport Grey. The space is notable for its “trailer size” range and lack of a full-size refrigerator.
“I had the choice of a real refrigerator and no counter space, or counter space and no refrigerator. And since I shop for food pretty much every day, I went with the counter space,” said Ms. Carmichael, who gets by with a dorm-size refrigerator.
The downside? No freezer space.
“But that’s actually a good thing since I can’t keep ice cream in the house and I stay on the straight and narrow,” said the super-svelte pianist, who also stays slim by being an award-winning tennis “fanatic” and member of the Sag Harbor Tennis Club.
The walls of the kitchen are filled with interesting details. There’s the other giant Hitchcock movie poster—this one of the 1956 film “The Wrong Man,” about a wrongly accused jazz musician; a painting by author Henry Miller (“Not many people know he also painted.”); and a photograph of Ms. Carmichael with Skitch Henderson performing at Carnegie Hall.
For space reasons, Ms. Carmichael converted the kitchen’s breakfast nook into a large storage pantry. She eats her meals—and entertains guests—in the adjoining enclosed sunporch.
To let more light in, Ms. Carmichael raised the ceiling and installed a skylight. One of her favorite pieces in the room is a very old painted door from Morocco that she found while traveling in Australia.
“It reminds me of a Kandinsky painting. I love the way it changes color with the room’s light,” she said.
Opening the porch door to the outside, Ms. Carmichael smiled as she surveyed the lush landscaping, plentiful oak trees, and the patio table covered by a charming arbor.
When asked what “home” means to her, she said, “Since I travel so much, home is my haven, my personal paradise. It’s peaceful, warm, cozy, and lovely ... The place where I heal from the travails of the road.”
The Judy Carmichael trio will perform a benefit concert on Sunday, June 28, on the grounds of the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton. The evening begins with a garden tour at 6 p.m., followed by the concert at 7 p.m. and a reception at 8 p.m. Tickets are $100 and benefit the Southampton Rose Society and Helga Dawn-Frohling. Call 283-0774, ext. 582, to reserve a ticket. Listen to “Jazz Inspired” on Sunday nights at 10 p.m. on WLIU 88.3 FM.
on Jun 17, 2009