In a narrow lot adjacent to her Long Island home, interior designer Muriel Brandolini fashioned an enfilade of guest rooms—and let nature do the rest.
“A narrow site, wedged between two lot lines… [Bortoluzzi] proposed a staggered, 145-foot-long string of cabins, “a little bit like a snake house,” she says. ”
In the kitchen of her guesthouse on eastern Long Island, interior designer Muriel Brandolini is putting fresh-cut dahlias and zinnias on the table for a late dinner with her son, Brando, and his girlfriend, who are driving out from New York in a few hours. Interior designer Caroline Sarkozy is stopping by for a drink, and tomorrow morning the actress Isabelle Huppert and one of her sons come for the weekend.
It isn’t clear where or how, exactly, any of these guests will make their entrance. The kitchen, living room, bedrooms and hallway all open onto Brandolini’s wild, unfettered garden, as does a sliver of an entry hall. The social conventions of greeting and introduction were not top of mind when she outlined a vision for the guesthouse—basic in many ways, but rich in its associations with nature and the outdoors—with architect Raffaella Bortoluzzi.
The narrow site, wedged between two lot lines, “was not one where you could do anything really crazy,” Bortoluzzi explains. “I said, ‘OK, why not just have the house itself be sculptural on the land-scape?’ ” Emboldened by her freethinking client, she proposed a staggered, 145-foot-long string of cabins, “a little bit like a snake house,” she says.
“There is no hierarchy,” the architect adds. “There really is no front and back. That was the idea, to be more casual.” This approach, while tickling some-thing deep in Brandolini’s psyche, would also play well against the main house, which Bortoluzzi had designed in 2010 as a viewing platform notched into a bluff overlooking the quiet waters of Peconic Bay.
“Be My Guest” by Sarah Medford appeared in WSJ. Magazine on February 9, 2022. Photography by Stephen Kent Johnson.