A Surprising, Ever-Evolving Home

“We call it Long Hall if we call it anything,” said Dianne Benson, better known as Dianne B. from her fashion days. She was leading an informal tour of the David’s Lane house abutting the East Hampton Village Nature Trail that she and Lys Marigold continue to add on to and redesign—after years of adding on and redesigning.

Life partners when they moved in together a dozen years ago or so, they are also soul mates who prove that opposites attract—“She’s early Renaissance, I’m contemporary,” said Ms. Benson about their basic preferences in fine art.

Ms. Marigold has traveled and collected more in the Middle East—Turkey and Jordan—Ms. Benson notes, while she spent more time in Japan and China. It’s clear, however, that they easily adopt an appreciation of each other’s interests, as manifest by the hundreds of art objects and books throughout the house that reference their different earlier lives, distinctive powerhouse careers and shared belongings, including family furniture, especially chests, breakfronts and chairs from different periods.

Pieces big and small, old and new, local and from cultures all over the world—gifts and acquisitions by way of friends, colleagues and travel—crowd walls, fill shelves, cover desks. Sculpture and photos are everywhere—an elegant white Michael Combs waterfowl carved out of red cedar hovers from a ceiling. A Jeff Koons porcelain puppy squats on a ledge. A sense of individual choice informs every room, giving the sense of it really being used. As Ms. Benson said, “The house is not decorated, it’s not a showhouse, we live everywhere in it.” They share the house with their adopted daughter, Skye Qi, when she’s home from college and with their beloved dogs, Flora Pandora and Magnolia.

The house sprawls on a site that originally held “a typical ranch,” a “rabbit warren of rooms” dating to 1940 when Ms. Marigold bought it in 1992. “It was a crazy house that no one wanted to buy. Lucky us.” She got it at an estate sale. And ever since, she and Ms. Benson have been building, renovating and reconstructing, designing views that connect them more immediately with the outside.

Leaving the world of high-end clothing design and style, where her innovative stores carried avant-garde names, and where she made a name for herself as a leading “fashionista” (Ms. Marigold’s affectionate reference), Ms. Benson started spending time in the Hamptons and soon, learning on her own, became a passionate gardener, eliciting the sobriquet “Dorothy Parker in gardening gloves” from an admirer of her witty 1994 cult classic gardening guide, “Dirt: The Lowdown on Growing a Garden with Style.” For the last couple of years she has been president of LongHouse Reserve.

Ms. Marigold, a former magazine editor and co-author with Faith Popcorn of books on women, trends and marketing, is a specialist on religion archaeology, with particular focus on the ancient Nabataen period (a diorama of Ms. Marigold in Petra made by Ms. Benson was on display). Ms. Marigold serves as vice chair of the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals and senior warden at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. Though they keep an apartment in the city, East Hampton is their “home.”

The house may surprise some who know Ms. Benson as a celebrated gardener of understated hues and subtle landscape configurations where green reigns over bold florals. By contrast, the house exudes a red-suffused warmth and informality.

Pictures and artifacts everywhere exemplify whimsy and eccentricity. The two women delight in “mixing it up.” Robert Mapplethorpe, Yoko Ono, Peter Hujar, Peter Dayton, shots of a young Skye at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, share space with old master oils and photos of and by famous friends. Narrow-planked hallways and sitting areas surprise with eclecticism—a centuries-old tall Buddha, Japanese bowls next to Tiffany ware, chairs from Ms. Marigold’s grandmother re-covered in Picasso-design tapestry, a hand-scrawled order sign in a bathroom that Ms. Marigold rescued from the old A& B Snowflake. An oversize color digitalized composite photo portrait of an African girl by Dutch artist Ruud van Empel greets visitors who arrive at the front door.

“What will they think when they peek in?” Ms. Benson wondered with amusement.

Though their home boasts four separate libraries—Literature and Poetry (the main library), Archaeology and Religion, Art and Travel and Gardening and Fashion—books open and closed can be found in every room, even the kitchen, which used to be the master bedroom in the ranch house. Now an arched-ceiling area, it contains a pewter fridge, cherry red cabinets and a small round marble table, but extends to include a bookcase and a wall mounting of lobster plates from Ms. Marigold’s mother. And books.

Indoors and outdoors seem to flow into one another at Long Hall. The master bedroom suite, built over what once was a glass-covered Olympic-size pool, opens into a sitting area and overlooks part of the Nature Trail. An adjoining large, “totally indulgent bathroom” comes with its own eclectic assemblage of objets d’art. An outside view takes in a 17th-century shed brought over from Wainscott. In another direction, plantings and deck surround an 18-square-foot dipping pool. And, of course there is, there has to be, a huge closet of clothes.

Did they design the house themselves? “Oh, did we go through architects, five to be exact,” said Ms. Benson. They wanted to follow the original footprint and finally wound up choosing “a builder of small houses,” who seemed to understand their desire to “build a house onto a house.”

Are they through?

Yes, said Ms. Marigold.

No, said Ms. Benson.

They agreed, however, that their added-on outdoor patio should be accessible from the inside.