East Hampton House Tour Serves Up Architectural Diversity

Michele Trunzo’s newly built “Tuscan Casetta” is a gorgeous home. But beauty notwithstanding, she and her husband, Pat Trunzo III, are still getting used to it.

The 4,300-square-foot Northwest Woods-based cottage—one of five houses to be featured on the 2012 East Hampton House & Garden tour over Thanksgiving weekend—is in the exact spot where their shingle-style, post-modern home burned to the ground four years ago.

“Nothing in this is from the old house,” Ms. Trunzo said, gesturing around the living, dining and kitchen areas during a tour of her home on Thursday. “This is all completely redone. It’s a completely different house, so we’re still adjusting because there’s nothing here very personal yet since all of our personal belongings burned. We had such beautiful artwork. The fire was in July 2008. They don’t know what happened. They don’t know.”

“They’ve been through a lot,” added tour chairman Joseph Aversano. “It was a midday fire. The winds were whipping, no one was hurt, but there was an

attic fan and everything just went very quickly. But you built this from the perspective that you knew what you wanted from a house. From what I can tell, it’s a much more personalized statement now.”

“No, you’re right, it is,” Ms. Trunzo agreed. “The other house was beautiful, but it had green granite counters and white shiny cabinets and the gold knobs. I was so done with white. I didn’t want anything white.”

She got her wish. This past July, she moved into a warm, colorful Italian estate built by her husband, who works with his Wainscott-based, family-owned business Trunzo Building Contractors. And there isn’t a white surface in sight.

The Trunzo abode, approximately six months old and built using modern energy-efficient practices, starkly contrasts the four other homes on the 28th annual tour: a modern-style home, a house with a combination of architectural and period styles, and two historic residences—a renovated Amagansett farmhouse built in 1894 by Captain Samuel Loper of the Life-Saving Service and a recently expanded 18th-century “half house,” with an intact core and a modern addition.

In addition to being historic, the “half house” has garnered a bit of attention, as well.

“Rockefeller had a scandal there and there was a government seizure of the house before these people bought it, but the more important story is it’s an intact ‘half house’ for 233 years,” Mr. Aversano said. “But we’re trending younger and younger on the tour, so I try to do a blend of different houses that each person might find something they like, as opposed to five shingle-style houses. I try to shake it up a little bit. I’m not Williamsburg.”

Design by East Hampton modernist architect Maziar Behrooz returns to the tour with a home in Wainscott, one that may even top last year’s “ARC House” in East Hampton Village, also visualized by Mr. Behrooz, according to Mr. Aversano.

“Maziar is a beast. And this house is even more brute than before,” Mr. Aversano said. “It’s magnificent. It was done in the early ’90s and then he removed portions of it and they bought out a neighbor’s property and they combined it in the most modernist way. It’s very strong triangulations and colors. Everything works off a triangular angle. Even the pool is triangular. And it has this floating resin floor that leads to a very memorable art gallery with very important art. Like, Parrish [Art Museum] type of art.”

On a quiet street just steps away from the village sits a combination of new and old: a circa-1940s white clapboard cottage recently renovated by Michael Derrig, owner of Landscape Details in East Hampton, and his wife, Dwyer, with interior design by Tom Samet.

What began as a simple “paint and tweak” turned into a massive project, the couple said.

“Just give it a fast paint job, that’s what I said to Tom,” Ms. Derrig said.

“Tweak it,” Mr. Samet said.

“As if,” Mr. Aversano laughed.

“Well, we’d moved around a bit and we decided that we wanted to settle in,” Ms. Derrig said. “We said, ‘Then let’s just make it ours.’ So, we did. We basically took it down to the studs.”

“Once we got into it and we saw the possibilities of what it could become, we decided to renovate,” Mr. Derrig explained.

“We got excited,” Ms. Derrig said, smiling at her husband.

The renovation began two days after closing on the house—September 10, 2011—and over the course of 10 months, they added on a family room, mudroom, laundry room, garage and a complete lower level, Ms. Derrig said. They also installed irregularly shaped, antique granite pavers in the lawn leading up to the house, as well as a pool, her husband added. The half-acre landscape features a limited plant palette, including crape myrtles, boxwoods and hydrangeas.

The Cape-style home utilizes traditional New England details, according to Mr. Samet, including tongue-and-groove walls broken up by faux bois, or false wood, wallpaper in adjacent rooms; charcoal gray in the more dramatic spaces, such as the media room; and pops of orange throughout, which tie back to the love seat in the living room.

“We worked around the orange couch,” Mr. Samet said. “It’s a warm color. To me, it’s not a winter or summer color. It has sort of become beige to us. I like it as an accent color. And people really live in the houses I decorate. They’re not just here for you to come see.”

“It’s not precious,” Ms. Derrig said. “It’s livable. It’s comfortable.”

“Dwyer and I are not trying to open up Restoration Hardware here,” Mr. Samet said. “We weren’t trying to do 2012. We were doing 2000 forever, right? A lot of this furniture will be around a long, long time because it’s all durable and user-friendly.”

“Right. I found this table. You found these chairs,” Mr. Derrig said to the interior designer. “It’s a collection of stuff.”

“The worst thing is walking in and knowing everything came from one place,” Mr. Samet said. “This house ...” he began.

“Comes from everywhere,” Mr. Derrig finished.

But there’s more to a home than what is immediately visible to the naked eye. Inside the Trunzo house, the builder is most proud of its green, energy-efficient building methodologies, he said. The home’s shell is made with structural insulated panels, or SIPs, which he described as “ice-cream sandwiches for adults because it’s two plywood skins with foam in between.”

Additional features include hydronic, radiant floor heating and geothermal air conditioning systems, a solar hot water heater supplemented by a small boiler, and an electronically controlled lighting system that uses LED fixtures and bulbs.

“I take a lot of pride in things that people don’t see,” Mr. Trunzo mused.

“There’s so much of that in this house,” Mr. Samet said, who had tagged along on the tour.

He also pointed out the unusually large kitchen island.

“It anchors the house,” he said.

“Oh, yeah,” Mr. Trunzo said. “Talk to Michele. We have a Bertazzoni stove. It’s Italian. We like it very much. It’s very attractive.”

“I could cook in this kitchen all day,” Mr. Aversano said. “This is a cook’s kitchen.”

“I had a ladies brunch for about 40 women two Sundays ago to kind of test it out,” Ms. Trunzo said. “By 9:30 that night, and many, many bottles of wine, tequila and vodka, we decided it’s a good party house.”

She laughed. “I know I’ll like it here. I already do.”

The East Hampton Historical Society will host its 2012 East Hampton House & Garden Tour on Thanksgiving weekend. The event will kick off on Friday, November 23, with a cocktail party from 6 to 8 p.m. at a private estate in the historic summer colony of East Hampton Village. The next day, on Saturday, November 24, five more homes will be on tour from 1 to 4:30 p.m. Advance tickets are $65, or $75 the day of the tour. Tickets for the opening night cocktail party start at $200 and include admission to the tour. To purchase tickets or for more information, call 324-6850 or visit easthamptonhistory.org.