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"View Slideshow\n\nRussell Groves wants to be perfectly clear. The architect\u2014whose r\u00E9sum\u00E9 details tenures with the leading-light firms Richard Meier Partners and Kohn Pedersen Fox and whose own young design office has completed a string of high-profile retail facilities\u2014did not supersize or gut or work any particular architectural alchemy on the secluded house in East Hampton. Rather, as he quite readily points out, he decorated it. A running theme with architects is that decoration is a lesser function to anything structural: the putative easier design route. But, Groves emphasizes, \"Decorating is a holistic blending of disciplines, and it's what we did. We took a tired, worn house with good lines and upgraded it with furnishings and materials to a previously unseen level of sophistication.\"\n\nThe residence, a 1970s amalgam of modernist forms (almost nothing built in that experimental decade was a simple box), had been serially remodeled over the ensuing years when two business owners purchased it as their year-round country-beach retreat. The couple eventually approached the New York City architectural and interior design firm S. Russell Groves in the winter in the hope of occupying the property the following summer. \"A whole redo, from top to bottom, by Memorial Day: the magical moment in the Hamptons,\" says Groves, with a residual sense of the challenge he faced. \"We don't usually work that way. But they had had some false starts with other architects, and they were weary and disenchanted, and a little desperate. I could see how very much they wanted to get in and start enjoying the place.\n\n\"So we said we would try to do most of the major work and have a few pieces of furniture by summer. They'd be in the house, if sort of camping out. But things fell together. Critically, we had a lot of the custom work done here in the city so that we could watch the progress. We're near the mill workers and upholsterers and lamp people\u2014we had our hands around all of that the whole way through. In the end we managed an incredible time schedule, and almost everything was finished by the beginning of the season.\" He pauses and says with a laugh, \"Breakneck speed and exhaustion, however, are not going to become the hallmarks of our practice.\"\n\nAlthough the primary improvements to the 4,850-square-foot house were surface applications, the architectural hand is evident. The formal entrance\u2014described by Groves as once having featured \"two fat, heavy columns and a mean set of steps\"\u2014is defined by a double-height, gridded glass cube with a vaulted roof overhang. He enlarged the landing proper and made the steps more gradual and gracious with plank decking of ipe, a sustainable Brazilian hardwood favored by architects for its warmth and sheen as much as for its water resistance and durability. He stripped the pair of steel columns supporting the overhang of their ungainly shells to reveal slender steel posts that he painted the color of ipe\u2014to both contrast with the house's white exterior walls and visually connect the entrance with the new, symmetrical landscaping (which his office also designed).\n\nThe ipe continues at the rear, where it is the woodsy leitmotif of the outdoor living area. The deep deck, which extends from the living and dining rooms and the study, and falls in steps to surround the pool as a terrace, is a crisp, unifying counterpoint to the disparate shapes and heights of the roofs at the rear elevation. A trellis-covered shower/spa (which leads into the lower-level lounge\u2014or \"indoor cabana,\" as dubbed by Groves\u2014and media room) at the west end of the deck is the volumetric culmination of the linear wood: Reinforcing the tenor of the residence, it deftly combines the relaxed and the restrained.\n\n\"The idea was to create a beach house, but not the typical kind with bead-board and wainscot,\" the architect notes. \"We weren't after shabby chic.\" As for the casually elegant, neutrally toned appointments and liberal use of heavy-grained, natural woods (bleached-white-oak floors; bamboo, teak and cerused oak for the Groves-designed furniture throughout); comfortable, durable fibers (raw silk, suede, wool and linen); and the water-themed artworks, he explains, \"We alluded to the beach environment without making it beach-specific.\"\n\nGroves retained the original T-shaped floor plan, which has the living room and study as central units flanked by the dining room/kitchen wing and, opposite, the bedrooms. \"It was your basic pitched-roof house, and we took advantage of the soaring space to soften the geometric structure,\" he says of the living room, the interior focal point. One guest room is on the main floor; the master suite and two additional guest rooms are situated, with separate stairways, on the upper level. Groves modernized the kitchen and baths. He added skylights and made larger openings of the old windows and doors to establish the element of transparency and better bring in the light.\n\nTypically, he acknowledges, the line between architecture and other disciplines is sharply drawn. \"What makes us somewhat different is that we work in various media and are able to express ourselves both architecturally and decoratively. It's all about the recipe\u2014here it was weighted on the decorative end\u2014and how you go about maintaining the integrity of the design.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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