A home that has a performance aspect in improving the environment is really important, in our opinion a timeless home, because basically it's a part of the context of the place.
My name is Paul Masi from Bates Masi Architects and I'm Aaron Weil and this is the Morris Cove Residence.
Morris Cove is one of a series of coves and inlets off of the main harbour and it forms this beautiful waterway and we're on a peninsula within that waterway with views in every direction.
In some of our preliminary research, looking at this through aerial data this peninsula was formed by dredging and spoils that they had placed here and previously there was a home here and frankly was contributing to the erosion of the property so one of our goals was to look at a new design that would be beneficial to the property, also for them in terms of living they wanted a house that not only responded to the views and the landscape but to the seasons.
With the brief of trying to improve the site we established a series of courtyards and the foundations of those courtyards not only support the building but are raised above the grade and act as basins that collect the roof run-off and then slowly filter it back into the ground.
In the design of raising these courtyards that supported the house they became these vessels that we could celebrate within the architecture but also that would hold the water and disperse it at a slower rate while the ground water subsided.
What's interesting is our office used to be just a couple of miles from here so we visited the site during storm surges and we were here in Sag Harbour during Katrina we've seen how bad it can be in terms of the flooding and how intense the rainfall can be so it was kind of real to us to address this issue.
The layout of the home is structured so it's oriented towards the water, the idea was to have five separate pavilions.
However the space between those pavilions were a common space or the more public space for the home and we were able to design it in such a manner that all of the spaces could be separated by sliding pocketing doors and thus each one of those pavilions could act as an independent volume.
Starting from the pool area the first volume is a family room den, into this more service sort of kitchen pantry, between them and the bedrooms we have the dining-living and then there's two guest rooms and the primary bedroom.
