They Gave a Jack Ceglic Home on Long Island a New Life. Then It Changed Theirs.

AS AN ANALOGY for life’s unpredictability, a home renovation goes far. There are few more literal ways in which we try to make our visions of the future concrete. But pipes leak, budgets creep and patience runs thin. Then there are the strange, happy accidents that come from making something personal under heightened conditions. When Andy McCune and Allie Fitzpatrick hired the interior designer Lauren Piscione to help them update an unusual modern house on Long Island in 2021, for example, they couldn’t have foreseen the joint venture they’d all begin together two years later.

“It came about serendipitously,” says McCune, a 29-year-old tech entrepreneur and creative director, of the home, which sits at the end of a dusty lane in Bridgehampton, N.Y. Originally designed for the actor and director Joe Mantello in 2008 by the artist and architect Jack Ceglic — who’s known for the industrial aesthetic he’s developed over the years, beginning with the SoHo gourmet grocer Dean & DeLuca in 1977 — the rectangular single-story dwelling occupies part of a former plant nursery; the surrounding two acres of grounds are shaggy with mature trees and banks of mugwort. In keeping with Ceglic’s style, the 3,660-square-foot building is clad in the same graphite-colored standing-seam steel that’s used to finish agricultural structures, with 20-foot-high ceilings that give the main living spaces a barnlike quality.

McCune and Fitzpatrick, who until last fall lived together in New York’s TriBeCa neighborhood, weren’t looking for a weekend place on the East End. “We’re not the typical hydrangeas-on-the-front-lawn type of Hamptons people,” says Fitzpatrick, 33, a personal chef. But in the spring of 2021, two friends sent McCune the home’s listing, sharing that it somehow felt like it already belonged to him. He’d sold his company two years before, and the couple liked the idea of a place outside the city where they could be in nature and host friends. As soon as they drove down the gravel front path and saw the early May sun glinting off the property’s trees, says Fitzpatrick, “we thought it was perfect.” Returning the next spring, she realized that many of those trees were cherries: The house seemed to float in a cloud of pink blossoms.

The pair imagined the three-bedroom home as a kind of sanctuary, which for them required introducing more warmth into the interiors, then characterized by uninterrupted expanses of white wall and concrete floor. They hired Piscione, 34, who was also renovating the couple’s city apartment, because they admired the bicoastal designer’s ability to layer softly textured natural materials (linens, jute, weathered wood) and her attention to detail: She once found a large African cabbage bonsai in Los Angeles so well suited for their New York apartment that she had it driven across the country on a truck. “The goal was to be able to open up their home really freely,” says Piscione, “to really release into nature.” Their distinct aesthetics — McCune was more inclined toward a muted wabi-sabi look, while Fitzpatrick fought for romantic touches like the living room’s tasseled swing-arm lamp — created a “fusion that felt so much greater than our styles individually,” says McCune. By the time he and Fitzpatrick moved in, the space seemed less like a pristinely beautiful dairy shed and more like a Japanese spa, with a cozy minimalism defined by low midcentury seating, vintage wood tables and boro-like wall textiles.

The project was almost startlingly smooth, says Piscione, in part because its collaborators were uncommonly aligned. “I don’t know how many designers are interested in going into business with their clients,” she adds. But one Saturday evening in the fall of 2022, about halfway through the design process, Fitzpatrick and McCune met the decorator at a bar in Paris. (She’d flown over to source antique furniture from one of the city’s flea markets, and the couple also happened to be in town.) They’d become friends by this point and, after a few drinks, the idea of starting a gallery together gained momentum; by that Monday, the three of them decided it would be a store and showroom selling imported vintage European and Asian furniture, as well as work by international emerging artists. McCune had recently started a new venture, an image archiving app called Cosmos, and had leased, for its office, an empty first-floor storefront on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Within weeks, they began picking out pieces on buying trips to Belgium and France — gravitating toward objects with history and patina, from a 1950s Charlotte Perriand daybed to a set of sheepskin-upholstered René Gabriel chairs — and by the following spring, they opened Galerie Was.

JUST AS THE house was a catalyst for the gallery, the pieces that the collaborators found in Europe informed the look of the home’s rooms. You enter the building through a metal Dutch door, its top half often left open in warm weather, as if to welcome the friends who stop by unannounced. From there, a small vestibule leads to the open central living room. In one corner of the space, tucked between a vine-draped 14-foot-tall ficus Audrey tree and a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows, is an undulating birch-wood lounger by the midcentury Swedish designer Bruno Mathsson, where Fitzpatrick likes to read. Standing to one side is an antique wood Swiss games table and, just past the fireplace, in the nook of the L-shaped couch, there’s a similarly well-worn low 19th-century Japanese tea table. Piscione designed the sofa, composed of soft rectangular lozenges wrapped in umber linen, and a shearling-upholstered butterfly armchair near it, specifically for the home, after which they became the first bespoke pieces offered by the gallery.

The space is, as Fitzpatrick and McCune had hoped, ideal for entertaining. Leading off the living room is a large dining room filled by a 1940s oak farmhouse table that seats 12. A sliding door opens onto a gravel patio, where Fitzpatrick likes to grill fresh seafood with vegetables from the local farm stands, and two simple guest bedrooms at the northwest end of the home are often claimed by visitors from the city. But the house also met McCune and Fitzpatrick’s shared desire for a private hideaway. The primary bedroom, at the easternmost corner of the building, is spare and serene, anchored by a linen-covered custom bed with an angular stained oak headboard. The adjoining bathroom contains an oversize soaking tub that faces a wall of glass doors that, when opened onto the pebble courtyard beyond, allow the homeowners to fulfill their dream of being fully immersed in nature.

“But our job was also to bring life inside,” says McCune. One marker of their success is that the home has been able to evolve with them, as if sympathetic to their changing needs. Last fall, the couple separated — but the place has nevertheless proved a refuge, if not in the ways they’d once imagined. Fitzpatrick and McCune remain close friends, and they still both use the house individually. “Even through the chaos of a breakup,” says McCune, “to go out there and get out of the city was nice.” Fitzpatrick, who now runs the gallery solely with Piscione, has also found comfort on Long Island with friends and family. “We didn’t want to just act like the last six years together didn’t happen,” McCune says. If the home was once a blank canvas on which to project their hopes for the future, it’s now a treasured record of their shared history. After all, says Fitzpatrick, “we built the house together.”