Pinning down a busy man during the bustling days of summer

The Watermill Center—Robert Wilson’s one-of-a-kind laboratory for the arts and humanities—was abuzz with activity on a recent hot summer afternoon.

It was 2:30 p.m. and the lingering scent of cumin and garlic filled the air of the center’s industrial-size kitchen as Malaysian chefs and helpers cleaned up the remainders of an outdoor lunch of vegetable samosas shared by the 60-plus artists-in-residence. Marta, a scruffy-looking mutt, happily scampered around the kitchen looking for fallen scraps.

Downstairs in the open-air summer office, a few fresh-faced administrators tapped away on Macintosh keyboards as a slight breeze swept through the light-filled room. Outside on the expansive, manicured lawns, a sea of tents—a lingering vestige from the previous weekend’s annual summer gala—stood momentarily empty after a full morning of creative rehearsals.

Over in the south wing, where a lecture had been held the night before, chairs needed minor straightening and windows needed closing. Here, priceless works of centuries-old artifacts share space with contemporary works of art, including a photograph of Andy Warhol in drag, a pair of glass-encased shoes once worn by actress Marlene Dietrich and a dramatic red paint-splashed graffiti installation by German artist Jonathan Meese.

By 3 p.m., Lauren DiGiulio, the center’s summer program coordinator, was trying to find out when Mr. Wilson—a towering figure in the world of experimental theater who was working upstairs in his personal office—would be available for his 2:30 p.m. interview. (It was later learned during our visit that earlier in the week Mr. Wilson had turned away a Manhattan film crew who had traveled out to Water Mill to interview him).

But a half hour later, word was sent that Mr. Wilson was now free to give a tour of his personal living quarters within the massive 20,000-square-foot building.

Dressed in black and sitting at a large work table cluttered with computers and papers, the celebrated artist finished penning a hand-written note using his signature block letters, gave it to one of his young male assistants to mail, and then looked up.

“So you want to know about the Watermill Center?” he asked, settling into his office chair. “I started my career in a loft space on Spring Street in Manhattan in the 1960s, that was before SoHo was SoHo. I was one of the first artists who moved down there; later Donald Judd and Paula Cooper followed and the whole scene changed.”

“Eventually I had three floors and I built my first theater works there with a group of people who worked communally together in a laboratory situation,” explained Mr. Wilson, who led Manhattan’s burgeoning avant-garde theater movement and founded the Byrd Hoffman School.

His first acclaimed works in the late 1960s and early 1970s included “King of Spain,” “The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin,” “A Letter for Queen Victoria” and “Deafman Glance,” a seven-hour, silent work that was a “sensation and filled 2,000 seat houses in Europe,” according to Mr. Wilson.

By 1976, he turned his attention to large-scale opera and, with composer Philip Glass, created the monumental “Einstein on the Beach” which achieved world-wide fame for both artists.

“After ‘Einstein’ was produced, I was basically bankrupt.” Mr. Wilson reported. “By that time the real estate in Manhattan was astronomically high and I couldn’t afford it any longer. My work really didn’t fit into the New York scene, it didn’t work well on Broadway and Lincoln Center was better suited for more conservative works,” acknowledged Mr. Wilson, who moved overseas and spent a decade working with European theaters and opera houses in collaboration with internationally renowned writers and performers.

“By the end of the 1980s, I wanted to get my foot back in the door in America, otherwise I would have become an expatriate. I started seriously looking for a location where I could establish an international place for the arts and humanities,” he said.

Mr. Wilson, a native of Waco, Texas, was no stranger to the East End of Long Island. In fact, he worked on “Einstein at the Beach” while visiting the Amagansett home of art collector and philanthropist Christophe de Menil (grandmother of recently deceased artist Dash Snow).

“I started coming out here in the 1960s and developed a real love for the light found in this part of the world. I had been looking everywhere, but didn’t think I could afford to live in the Hamptons,” he said. “Somehow I managed to get the monies together to buy this place.”

In 1992, Mr. Wilson stumbled upon a wooded 6-acre property on Watermill Towd Road that had been abandoned since the late 1950s and was once home to a large Western Union factory. It is believed that scientists at the telecommunications facility—which dated back to 1926 and once employed 250 employees—invented the first fax machine there.

Today, the Watermill Center’s building and lush landscape bear the imprint of Mr. Wilson’s aesthetic ideals and are characterized by a careful integration of natural and man-made components, including river rock, corrugated zinc and cinder block.

Since Mr. Wilson also has exhibited drawings, furniture designs and installations in museums and galleries internationally, it’s not surprising that when it came time to build the Watermill Center he already had the architectural designs firmly rooted in his mind.

“Architecture is about time and space, architecture is about lines, and architecture is about light,” he explained, taking a pen to paper to illustrate his point. “Time, for me, is a vertical line. This vertical line goes to the center of the earth to the heavens. And space is a horizontal line. The cross between space and time is the architecture of everything. It’s how you construct a building, it’s how you play Mozart on a piano, it’s how you sit in a chair, it’s how you sing an aria, and it’s how you conduct an orchestra.”

And it’s how Mr. Wilson designed the Watermill Center.

The building’s horizontal north and south wings are connected with what he described as the building’s three-story “knee.” Standing on the knee’s upper “bridge,” which joins the two wings, you can “look all the way through the building from one end to the other, through space and time,” all the way down a woodland path where a large Penji stone from Papua, New Guinea, dating back to 3,500 years before Christ, can be found among a ring of cedar trees.

The ground floor of the “knee” is filled with a cove of river stone designed with artificial light underneath, which enables the light to “wash up the walls.” And from the roof line above, natural light “falls into the sloping roof” and inhabits the space.

“Architecture is also about doors. The Bible said, ‘Beeee-hoooold, I have set before thee an open door,’” Mr. Wilson bellowed dramatically. “So here there’s no door, just an opening.”

In the south wing, Mr. Wilson placed office and library space on the ground floor, and large rehearsal/studio and gallery spaces on the second and third floors. In the north wing, the kitchen and dining area can be found on the ground floor, dorm space for up to 15 visiting artists on the second floor, and Mr. Wilson’s 2,000 square-foot apartment on the third floor.

Throughout the space, white is the preferred wall color and the wood floors are stained an ebony hue.

Mr. Wilson’s quarters are divided into several adjoining rooms—a study (where he and his assistants were working on this day), a walk-in closet, bedroom, bathroom and living room. As there is no personal kitchen, Mr. Wilson joins the artists-in-residence downstairs for lunch and dinner.

As he quickly walked through the rooms—by now Mr. Wilson realized that he was running late for his next appointment—he pointed out each room’s treasures, no small feat for a man whose eclectic collection of art and artifacts grows at a rate of about 300 pieces a year and requires extra storage space in a warehouse in Holbrook.

Mr. Wilson began collecting while still in his teens, and over the past 50 years, the collection has grown to upward of 8,000 pieces. The collection—ranging from artwork from the Stone Age to the present—contains many museum-quality pieces that hail from various Indonesian cultures to works by such luminaries as Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Eames and contemporary artists including Agnes Martin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Dash Snow and Paul Thek (Mr. Wilson is the executor of the artist’s estate and has plans to 
build underground galleries to showcase Mr. Thek’s work at the Watermill Center).

Also in the Watermill Center’s collection are props, mostly chairs, which Mr. Wilson designed and constructed for his own theatrical productions. Highly regarded by curators for their sculptural qualities, these props can command upward of $80,000 a piece.

Pointing to a large black-and-white portrait hanging on the wall of his study, Mr. Wilson said, “That’s a photograph of Dash Snow he gave me four days before he tragically died of an overdose two weeks ago.”

Nearby hangs a tiny photograph in an ornate frame of Gertrude Stein, which was taken by and given to Mr. Wilson by composer/critic Virgil Thompson. On another wall is reminder of another close friend who died recently, the great dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham.

“I performed ‘Hamlet’ at Lincoln Center some years ago and Merce flew over from Europe to see it. I said, ‘Oh, Merce, it means so much for you to be here. I could never be doing what I’m doing if I hadn’t seen your production of ‘Canfield’ in the late 1960s. It changed my life,’” Mr. Wilson reminisced. “The next day, he sent me all his notations from ‘Canfield,’ so I framed them.”

The centerpiece of Mr. Wilson’s bedroom is a custom-made platform bed which was made by artists who attended the 2006 Summer Program. In a lighted, recessed space above the bed is a sampling of some of the 300 ceramic works he has collected by artist Hedwig Bollhagen.

A large television on the wall, with videos and DVDs underneath, gives clue to what Mr. Wilson has been watching lately—a VHS tape of the Montgomery Clift/Elizabeth Taylor classic, “Suddenly Last Summer” and a film about Maria Callas.

Off the bedroom, a rectangular walk-thru closet is a true curiosity as it does not contain any clothes or personal belongings. Instead the closet is a repository for miniature chairs which hang on the expanse of the wall. There’s a chair made by Buckminster Fuller out of parts of a geodesic dome, one of Mr. Wilson’s hand-crafted steel rod chairs, and an upholstered Louis the 15th chair, which was a 60th birthday present from Baroness Philippine de Rothschild, owner of the famed Chateau Mouton-Rothschild vineyard (Mr. Wilson designed a label for the winery’s 2001 vintage).

As for his love of chairs, Mr. Wilson said, “It’s a long story and I don’t have time to tell you,” but based on the profusion of them throughout the Watermill Center, it’s obvious that chairs qualify as an obsession for the artist.

Mr. Wilson’s stark bathroom features a steel prison toilet and large wall cabinet that came from a sanatorium, while a tub from the Italian company Agape sits in the middle of the bathroom. A large 10-foot-by-7-foot yellow foam cushion sits in the middle of the 
living room next door. More of a work of art, it’s rare that anyone sits on it, he said.

Mr. Wilson acknowledged that his Water Mill living space is a far cry from his childhood home in Waco. “We had sink-in carpets. Once my father came to visit me in New York and said, ‘Oh, my God, you have nothing comfortable.’ And I said, ‘Dad, comfort is a state of mind.’ He just didn’t get it.”

And with that personal revelation, Mr. Wilson was off to another appointment—this one a workshop for a new production of Monteverdi’s opera, “The Return of Ulysses.” Although the production is premiering at La Scala Opera House in Milan, Italy in the fall of 2011, its comfortable beginnings will have begun at the Watermill Center this summer.