Quogue Gallery Owners To Open Their Home for Quogue House Tour

Chester and Christy Murray, the owners of the Quogue Gallery, will open up their recently built, art-filled Quogue home for viewing during the Quogue Historical Society Holiday House Tour on Saturday, December 10.

Throughout the house are paintings, prints and sculptures by modern and contemporary artists, and needlepoint recreations of famous artworks.

There are a number of works by Pablo Picasso, Chester’s favorite artist, and more by Georges Braque, a French artist who helped develop Cubism; Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French architect and painter who was a pioneer of modern architecture; Gustave Moreau, a French symbolist painter; Alberto Giacometti, a Swiss sculptor and painter; Raymond Hendler, a New York School abstract expressionist and action painter who died in East Hampton in 1988; and East Hampton color field artist Susan Vecsey, among others.

The needlepoints are by Chester’s late grandmother Suzanne Weintraub. One is a to-scale recreation of “The Snail (L’escargot),” a 1953 collage by Henri Matisse that’s at Tate in London.

“Chester’s grandmother was a beautiful needlepointer,” Christy said.

And Chester’s step-grandfather is the late William H. Weintraub, a founding co-publisher of Esquire magazine who was a major art collector — which is how Chester’s family got started to be interested in art.

“I was a Wall Street executive for 30 years, but we were always art collectors and interested in the arts,” said Chester, who is also the chair of the Quogue Historical Society.

After he retired, they got bored, he said, and, over dinner, their friend architect Stuart Disston said that Quogue needs a contemporary art gallery — and suggested they be the ones to run it.

“We sort of agreed, I think after probably having imbibed too much,” Chester said. “And so that’s how it got started.”

They opened Quogue Gallery in 2014 in the Quogue Street building that Disston owns.

“We show a lot of abstract expressionism in the gallery, and we have a lot ourselves personally in our collection,” Chester said.

He admitted that he never thought the gallery would be coming up on 10 years. “I thought, maybe, you know, we would try it for one or two years and it would fizzle out,” he said. “But it’s done very well. We’ve had fun with it.”

Disston, of the Quogue and Norwalk, Connecticut, architecture and design firm Austin Patterson Disston, or APD, also designed the Murrays’ Beach Lane home and four other homes that they previously lived in, a mix of new homes and historic renovations. Their current house was completed in 2019, fronting a dug canal fed by two underground streams and pouring out into Ogden Pond.

The water can be seen from nearly every room in the house and is even visible when standing outside the front door. The glass entryway looks straight through a corridor — with stone salvaged from a bank in Boston — to another glass door that opens to the backyard, and the infinity edge pool that is sited right at the edge of the canal.

“The sound of the infinity edge spilling into the catch basin is really quite beautiful,” Christy said. “It’s very tranquil back here. There’s a lot of duck life, geese, swans — you name it.”

It wasn’t always that way. Back in 2017, well before the house was completed, the canal was in bad shape, but they worked toward a plan to turn it around.

“When we first bought this property, this had nothing but algae all over this entire pond,” she recalled. “And we coordinated somebody to come in, restore it, give us prices, clean it out, aerate it, and it came to 30-something thousand dollars. So we wrote all of our neighbors. Everybody could not run a check over fast enough — and this is the end result.”

The water is now clear, and a number of bicycles, logs and shopping carts discovered under the water have been removed. “Now it’s incredibly healthy,” Chester said. “We have all kinds of bird life out there.”

“We’ve got fish. We’ve got everything. Crabs,” Christy added. “It’s really wonderful.”

Their pool is an attractive place for geese and ducks to land, but they learned they could keep the waterfowl out of the pool by putting out plastic swans.

The Murrays were able to site their new house and pool so close to the water because they are located on the footprint of a house and pool that stood there previously. “There was a house here from the 1960s, 1962, and it was beyond the pale,” Chester said. “So we knocked it down.”

He explained that the area around the canal had been part of the Quogue House hotel property, which was in operation from 1880 to 1955. The land was low and marshy, 3 feet below the road, and vegetables and flowers for the hotel were grown there.

After the hotel closed, the building was razed. A couple of men — including a Quogue mayor — bought the land and dug canals out of the marshes to create waterfront property and used the dirt they had removed to elevate the low land, Chester explained.

It was Christy who first recognized the potential of the Beach Lane property that would become their home.

“Christy had the vision,” Chester said. “She dragged me here in November of 2014. It was incredibly cold — and we had this beautiful house at 5 Club Lane, which I love — and she said, ‘Look at this place. We’ve got to buy this place.’ I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ Because the house was really in terrible shape and everything. And she had the vision of what it could be — and this is it.”

He noted how private it is, a rarity for Quogue: This time of year, no other houses are visible, and in summer, when the trees all have their leaves on, even less is visible.

“We also loved the fact that it has a very large sky, yet you’re very private,” Christy added.

The Murrays moved to Quogue full time in 2010 but were seasonal residents going back to childhood. He grew up in Connecticut, and Christy grew up in Garden City. Both of them summered with their families in Quogue beginning in the 1960s, though the village is not where their relationship started. They became reacquainted as young adults in New York City.

In their years together, they have had several houses built or renovated, though their new Beach Lane home may be their last.

“We said, ‘We’ve got one more house in us,’” Christy said.

With every house they have done with Disston, they have handed him a file with all of the elements they wanted included, she said. For example, the large swoop in the roofline above the entry, the glass door and the big window of their Beach Lane home. “We gave him those elements, among others, and said, ‘Here it is. Put Humpty Dumpty together,’” she said.

Another element they wanted, Chester pointed out, is to site the house to best take advantage of the water views. The house is turned slightly to do just that.

And Disston also took into account the light.

“The house, you rise with the sun and you set with the sun,” Christy said. “But it travels around the house in such a way that the house is just always flooded with warm light. It’s beautiful.”

Disston also designed a gallery at the top of the stairs to the second floor to display pieces from their art collection and a “bridge” over the entry corridor that connects the upstairs bedroom to the rest of the house. “It’s really kind of a unique little walk that we haven’t seen otherwise,” Christy said. “He comes up with very special little touches that he’s completely known for.”

Their last house was a series of connected barns that they renovated, the oldest portion dating back to the 1700s. Something that house has in common with their new home is one big room for gathering, which has long been a theme in their houses.

“We’ve always lived in homes that had one large room, and we have found that with our lifestyle and the kids and their friends, everybody loves to collect in one area,” Christy said. “So we love to restore old houses. We also like to build new. So we sort of flip and flip between new and old.”

Their master suite is down on the first floor, far from the gathering room and everything else, to provide a getaway. “If the kids are entertaining and they’ve got friends over here or grandchildren and we want quiet, we put the master bedroom as far away from the main living area as possible,” she said.

Plus, a fifth bedroom has been converted into a sitting room for their kids and grandchildren to have their own private space.

Outside, rather than stone or another hard surface, the walking paths are simply designated by shortly cut grass.

“I was standing on a putting green one day and I said, ‘This is walked on all day long. It remains beautiful. I’m going to put putting greens in for the front walkway,’” Christy recalled.

“I felt the house was already raised very high, and of course everybody’s first thought is, ‘Let’s do a stone wall, or let’s do some kind of a retaining wall.’ And I wanted it soft. I didn’t want to call more attention to the house,” she continued.

They also have an allée of crepe myrtles with rhododendrons and hydrangeas. “I cut the path there to look like a Matisse figure,” Christy said. “So it’s very curvy and very beautiful, but, again, it has the very low-cut grass.”

In the allée is a cow figure, covered with vinca and oregano that’s grown rather long and shaggy. “He is looking more like a Highlander,” she quipped.

Admission to the house tour from 2 to 6 p.m. on Saturday, December 10, is $60. Admission to the cocktail party at one of the houses on the tour from 6 to 8 p.m. is $50 and admission to both the tour and the party is $100. Purchase tickets at quoguehistory.org/holiday-tour. On the day of the tour, pick up or purchase tickets at the Pond House, 114 Jessup Avenue, Quogue, between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. Tickets will also be on sale at the Quogue Library, 90 Quogue Street, from 1 to 4 p.m.

The tour also celebrates the 200th anniversary of Quogue’s 1822 school house, located on the Quogue Library grounds at 90 Quogue Street. The historical society has found the diary of Miss Lizabeth Griffing, who taught there in 1868 and is the subject of an exhibition currently on view there. The house that she was born in and raised in, the White Horse on Montauk Highway, is one of the six stops on the tour, as is the circa 1820 Captain Henry Gardiner House, where Griffing often stayed.