Colored Villa in Shelter Island

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A giddy house with colored aluminum walls appeared on Long Island thanks to three serious men. Once an artist David Hockney, when tired after another scandal with critics accusing him of copying Picasso told his fellow architects Peter Stamberg and Paul Aferiat that the greatness of the artist can be judged by his predecessors, he imitates. This phrase was deeply sunk in their souls.

Colored Villa in Shelter Island Inspired by Legendary Architecture

Country mansion by Peter Stamberg and Paul Aferiat in Shelter Island

Both architects have grown on Long Island and in their teens they stared at houses built by Marcel Breuer and Charles Gwathmey. Together they began to work in 1970, but the idea of a country mansion, which summarized all their preferences, appeared a few years ago after a tour of the pavilion “Barcelona” by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. As Aferiat said, they came up with this project being on the plane.

Legendary construction of Mies van der Rohe inspired them for a plan for future construction. The mansion consists of two volumes just as “Barcelona”. Among other sources of inspiration there is “The Glass House” by Pierre Sharo, Bernard and Louis Beyvuta dAlba, “House of the waterfall” by Frank Lloyd Wright, “Hoffman House” by Richard Meier and chapel in Ronchamp by Le Corbusier. The architects redesigned the ideas of the legendary architects according to their own views.

From the standpoint of Stamberg and Aferiat not all concepts, which are popular among modernists, have passed the test of time. They, for example, do not like too much the house with transparent walls. These days, there is no sense to build another glass box, as they say.

It was decided to replace the glass with the translucent polycarbonate panels, and use corrugated aluminum covered with bright paint instead of modernists’ favorite natural stone. In the first half of the twentieth century such color diversity would have been unthinkable. The designers like how untreated aluminum shines, so they chose a paint that reflects the light not worse than the metal.

The assembled house turned out to be extremely self-sufficient.