They Gave a 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.