At Home With Ron Wendt and Philip MacGregor

Entrepreneurs Ron Wendt and Philip MacGregor are not the type of men to buy someone else’s dream.

That’s why, when house hunting, they always look for a fixer-upper—but one with good bones and a unique environment.

Eight years ago, the couple found exactly what they were looking for: an 1,800-square-foot Colonial-style getaway tucked in the woods of Bridgehampton, far from their work as event creative directors in Manhattan.

“When I saw that there was a pool, I knew Philip would be in for sure,” Mr. Wendt said, lounging on a couch in his living room last month.

“I never thought I could afford a pool,” Mr. MacGregor laughed. “Movie stars!”

Though the couple lives in an area overflowing with the rich and famous, they steer clear of that social scene, they said. They’re homebodies at heart and craved a destination where they could recharge their batteries—where Mr. MacGregor could cook and Mr. Wendt could garden, they said.

But before anything, the house needed a severe makeover. The wide-planked “gymnasium-honey-colored” floors were stripped and pickled, Mr. Wendt said. They re-purposed the barn wood covering one of the living room walls by installing it in the master bedroom and they redesigned the foyer.

“The front hall, there was just a lot of sheetrock everywhere,” Mr. Wendt said.

“It looked like, really, a 1980s house,” Mr. MacGregor said.

“Yeah, it did, which it was.”

“There weren’t any details in here. So we brought them in.”

Aside from sprinkling an eclectic collection of antlers throughout the house and installing a library on the second floor, the couple paneled the wall behind the living room staircase and beefed up a column connecting the two stories—making them both appear “more significant and important” in the home’s landscape and melding the historical with the modern, they said.

A finishing touch on the three-month-long renovation, during which the crew lived in the house, was a sign coming up the drive. “Basilwood,” it reads, in honor of the couple’s dachshund, Basil, who Mr. MacGregor affectionately calls “Basi.”

“When we were thinking about naming the house,” Mr. MacGregor said, “we had all these names like Wendthome—Ron’s last name—or all these names about the East End, but Basil being our dog ...”

“Our daughter,” Mr. Wendt interrupted.

“Yeah, exactly,” his partner said. “We figured, you know, Dollywood, Basilwood.”

“We don’t charge admission,” Mr. Wendt laughed. “This is the place where she’s the happiest, so everything revolves around her,” he added, giving Basil a little rub on the head while he held her in his arms during a tour of the house.

The home’s color scheme—mainly neutral grey and sea tones—is borrowed from the trees outside, Mr. Wendt said. The gardens are planted with boxwood, holly, rhododendron, white roses, blue salvia and ligustrum. And the planters host a bevy of flowers, including lantana, nicotiana, coleus, and nasturtium.

“If you look, all of the oaks, there’s this sort of grey and a bit of a bluish-green lichen growing on them,” Mr. Wendt pointed out the double-glass doors. “It seemed right, the right thing to do.”

Mr. Wendt’s passion for nature stems back to his childhood while gardening with his grandmother in Texas.

“You don’t have any idea what it’s like to garden in Texas, when you send a shovel into the ground and you hit rock,” he said. “I’ll never forget that day when we came out here and I stuck my first shovel into the ground and it went, ‘Whoosh.’ It just whooshed. It was great.”

When Mr. Wendt moved to New York from Texas in 1990, he started off with garden design—mostly terraces. It was one of his loves. He and Mr. MacGregor, a former actor with a strong business sense, founded their own company, Ron Wendt Design, shortly after meeting at the New York International Gift Fair nearly 23 years ago at the Javits Center in Manhattan.

“How could we do that when we’re 28 now?” Mr. MacGregor laughed.

“Yeah, right. Exactly,” Mr. Wendt said, grinning at his partner. “Our moms used to drop us off at the show. We were in the same nursery there.”

The duo’s career paths completely changed when one of Mr. MacGregor’s friends asked Mr. Wendt to design the floral arrangements for a Tiffany & Co. dinner.

“This happened two or three times and I kept turning it down because it wasn’t what I did, you know?” Mr. Wendt recalled. “But then the guy who was supposed to be doing it flaked out and so she called me in a panic and I said, ‘Alright, fine, I’ll do it.’ And the funny thing is, it led to a job immediately after that with Chanel, which then led to a wedding, which led to even more work.”

“We weren’t anybody,” Mr. MacGregor said. “And before you knew it, people started calling. And pretty much everyone who was calling was a prominent, reputable company.”

“So I dropped garden design,” Mr. Wendt laughed, though he earned his master’s degree in landscape design from Columbia University last year, which he is incorporating into his business.

Most of their company’s clients are high-end jewelry and luxury brands, including Cartier, Swarovski and Stuart Weitzman. The couple also designed Drew Barrymore’s New York engagement party and Caroline Kennedy’s 50th birthday gathering. Additionally, they work with a number of non-profit organizations, such as The Whitney Museum of American Art and the School of American Ballet.

“It’s kind of like we’re the creative directors of the event,” Mr. MacGregor explained. “As opposed to just ...”

“Showing up with flowers,” Mr. Wendt offered. “With flowers, it really does go back to design. Maybe it’s the opportunity to play God, I don’t know, to control our environment and change our environment. You create environments, you create fantasies, you create stories. You hopefully create charm and curiosity.”

Ron Wendt Design handles at least 60 events annually, Mr. MacGregor said. This past August, the company was commissioned to design LongHouse Reserve’s only wedding of the summer in the East Hampton gardens. The young couple—surfers with a lot of personal style—wanted a “Great Gatsby” wedding, which the duo achieved with a Sperry tent and long, white, low-lit tables decorated with flowers of different shades of greens and whites.

“They wanted an East End feel,” Mr. MacGregor said. “We were like, ‘We got it. We know exactly what you want. Just trust us, let’s do it.’ It worked out really beautifully.”

“The chuppah was in front of the Hornbeam Allée and at the back was the de Kooning sculpture,” Mr. Wendt said. “I mean, you’ve got everything you’d want right there. It was just amazing. You can’t go wrong there. It’s such a beautiful place.”

The Hamptons, which the couple said they are happy to call their full-time home, are a vacation from the their brownstone apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, they said. It’s high Victorian—“believe it or not,” Mr. Wendt said—with all oak paneling and 14-foot ceilings.

“So it’s like you have to get dressed up to go to the living room,” he said. “It has all the original details,” the couple said in unison.

“So it looks like a library and it’s very dark,” Mr. MacGregor said. “Two years ago, we were in Venice and both of us had never been, and we had the same sort of experience with the light. We’re like, ‘This is remarkable.’ The only other light we’ve been so stimulated by was out here. There’s a certain time, it’s a magical time out here at dusk that everything turns this sort of lavender. And you’re just like, ‘Wow.’”