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"View Slideshow\n\nShe stands between two of the tall columns on the Parthenon porch, silk gown fluttering as if she were Athena alighting. Beyond her is a sublime vista framed by the fluted pylons. Through the building, the views appear infinite. Architect Preston T. Phillips had long admired Edward Steichen's 1921 photograph of Isadora Duncan at the Acropolis. When asked to design a simple beach retreat for close friends, he recalled the vista beyond the building in the photograph\u2014a copy of which he \"had torn from a magazine 20 years ago and kept in an inspirational-photograph cache.\" The image seemed to conjure the spirit for the house, leaving \"an early impact on its design in terms of scale and proportion,\" he says. The intent: a plain dwelling on a secluded Hamptons beachfront that would enrich the summer days. The clients were already well established in East Hampton, with a country house in that town. Together, with Phillips, they envisioned a house to enhance the beach\u2014a simple cottage rather like those built by local farm families a century earlier. It was to be a retreat for catching a nap, a shower and lunch before returning to the sands.\n\nGoing to the beach for pleasure is a modern idea. Once thought of as places to fish but too dangerous to inhabit, beaches became popular in the 19th century, when the wealthy followed the royals to the sea. Wood-frame Norman villas were built atop the French dunes on the English Channel. America's industrialists soon followed suit, building shingle-covered houses on the dunes of the Atlantic coast.\n\nThe cottage was raised above the sand: The house was to be a part of the coast, not embedded within it.\n\nThese residences were intended for carefree summer days, not year-round use. The short season was celebrated in a big, open living hall centered on a fireplace and on the porches. In the 20th century more substantial houses appeared, eliminating the seasonal feeling of the beachfront cottage.\n\nPhillips, who himself moved to the once summer-only colonies of Long Island's East End in 1984, returned to the original idea of the beach house in this unbuilt design. He created a wood structure swelling with the breezes on the open porch and filled with light in the large living area, with its double-sided fireplace.\n\nIn the 19th century the Beaux-Arts\u2013trained architects emphasized the entrance to a building. Here, along the water's edge, the entrance is a ramp, not stairs. Without having to watch for steps, one is able to make a passage to the house while looking at the beach as it is revealed rather than focusing on the ego of the building. The cottage was raised to hover some five feet above the sand: The house was to be a part of the coast, not embedded within it. \"The forms look as if they were hewn by the forces of nature,\" explains Phillips.\n\nTo some, the ornamentation on 19th-century beach houses seems superfluous. Phillips traded spindles and turrets for pure geometric elements. The De Stijl planes of the entrance walls present a clean redefinition of the summer cottage. But instead of choosing the flat surfaces of the Dutch buildings, the architect specified textured cedar shingles to echo the brush growing around the beach.\n\nTopping the building is a zinc roof that appears as an extension of the ocean. The curved silver metal acts as a crown, uniting the living area and porches, and seems to float down onto the house, at the same time lending it an air of stability and protection.\n\nThe interior of the residence, featuring spartan glass walls, cork floors and mahogany detailing, recalls the materials used in beach houses designed by Stanford White, of McKim, Mead White, in Elberon, New Jersey, 125 years ago. The concept of open space that White perfected is invoked here, but without the clutter of late-19th-century objects. This house was to be minimally furnished.\n\nA century earlier wood houses on the dunes often had sleeping porches. That wonderful interval between indoors and outdoors lives again in Phillips's rendering, where, on the second floor, a poetic piano-shaped balcony links the house's bedroom with a covered sleeping porch, an ideal place for a nap. A nautical theme is expressed in the prow forms in the house plan, where the two tiers of porches face the sea much as one might at the bow of a yacht.\n\nThe beach house was to be used exclusively by its owners. The single bedroom and exposed exterior shower make this a respite from their more formal East Hampton home. Its anchoring double-pylon prow, rendered in wood, not fluted marble, recalls the famous Steichen photograph, a vision of solitude with nature and architecture\u2014the perfect pair.\n\nPhillips traded spindles and turrets for geometric elements. The De Stijl planes of the walls present a redefinition of the summer cottage.\n\nConceived as a play house without modern conveniences, the cottage was to have no heating system or air-conditioning. On a nippy evening the fireplace could be lit to remove the chill from the air either in the glass chamber inside or on the screen porch. Sunset and cocktails from the small kitchen would cap a carefree day. The kitchen was not for pedestrian fare but rather for a picnic and a lobster pot.\n\nThe playful nature of the house seemed simple enough. But cold reality came rushing in when the bids for building returned. Even a modest structure is expensive. The cost of the house came to nearly three times the budget, thus ending the quest for the perfect beach cottage."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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