Peter Hallock and Craig Mowry’s Otherworldly Cedar Crest Cottage

There are some houses that defy description, so unique and chock full of visual treats that the only thing one can say is “Wow.”

That aspect of wonder would be an apt first reaction to the Cedar Crest cottage that is home to Peter Hallock, a longtime fixture on the Hamptons real estate scene with Southampton family roots that can be traced back to 1866, and his husband, Craig Mowry, a filmmaker and inventor of technology with 32 U.S. patents that underlie how digital images look and are shared.

Twenty-two years ago, the couple had a dream of spending summers on the Maine coast, but the realities of life got in the way. So they did the next best thing by finding the closest thing to a Maine experience among their real world, which has always been based in Southampton with outposts in Manhattan, California for a time, and now South Florida. Hallock said Cedar Crest, a private bay community, is “very generational,” so houses rarely come up for sale, and they bought the house the first second they saw it.

Located on nearly four acres at the end of a heavily wooded road in the low-key hamlet of North Sea, the cottage began its life as a kit home originally displayed by a manufacturer at the 1939 World’s Fair. It was trucked to its current location, a parklike expanse of towering cedars, lush foliage and verdant lawn fronting painterly Davis Creek, with a seemingly endless wooden footbridge spanning the creek and salt marsh to the sandy beaches of Little Peconic Bay beyond. It was one of a colony of cottages owned by the Tupper family, each named for a different flower. The Hallock-Mowry home was called “Love in a Mist” after a feathery blue-violet old-fashioned perennial.

Modest in size, the house’s footprint and basic structure are completely original. To maintain the authenticity of its kit home provenance, any windows or doors that were replaced were carefully chosen, sized and located in the exact same manner as the existing ones. An interior fireplace was also added, along with a wood-burning stove on one of the porches for chilly evenings. The façade and outdoor elements, however, were given an extraordinary amount of charming detailing. Cedar limbs harvested from fallen trees on the property, were heavily employed to create an Adirondack attitude via natural branch decorative overhang supports and deck railings. A large brick terrace was added and, most dramatic of all, is a dining pergola featuring a dense canopy of wisteria that appears to be in the process of enveloping everything.

All exterior siding was painted in the darkest brown with windows, shutters and doors in an equally dark green, allowing the entire house to recede into the surrounding greenery. To describe it all as organic would be an understatement, as one cannot tell where the house ends and the foliage begins. In contrast, pieces of contemporary sculpture dot the grounds, along with a theatrical in-ground fire wall, where flames lick a steel sculpture by artist Robert Kelly. And then there’s the guest house: a smartly outfitted vintage Airstream Caravel trailer that sleeps two, set on its own gravel patio. Who’da thunk it?

Within, the layout is simple and succinct, with a procession of small but smartly arranged rooms that include a single bedroom, a living room, a central dining room, a shipshape kitchen, two baths and a pair of glass-enclosed porches that function as additional entertaining spaces. The homeowners continued the waterside cottage vibe with a heavy application of wainscoting to most ceilings and walls, which along with all floors, were painted a glossy white and then layered with rugs upon rugs. In the living room, both the fireplace wall and the opposing gable, along with the room’s upper moldings, are fashioned completely from natural white birch branches. Don’t think for a moment that the size of the cottage poses any limitations to the homeowners’ abilities to entertain. “We’ve had sit-down dinners for 40 and cocktails for 200!” Hallock said.

Hallock labels his DIY décor as “traditionally eclectic.”

“We decorated the cottage ourselves, with inspiration from our travels. We are overzealous collectors,” he said.

It’s true; the dizzying number of collections include Japanese glass fishing floats, horn tumblers, pieces of sculpture, ceramics, antlers and a treasure trove of art that ranges from classical landscapes to midcentury collages to a Nahum Tschacbasov Cubo-surrealist piece titled “Red Head.”

With an iconic Southampton Village home as a previous address, Hallock explained, “My great-great-grandfather, Dr. David Hallock, also had a year-round house on South Main Street but had a summer place close by. Many local families had village homes but summered a few miles away in what were fondly called ‘camps.’ I never expected to follow this multigenerational migration to the bay.”

Clearly, it’s been a successful trip.