By Anthony Paletta
Norman Jaffe designed a wide range of modern homes but few were as distinctive as the 1971 Osofsky house. It’s one of three properties Jaffe built adjacent to one another on Shelter Island, an enclave only accessible by ferry between the eastern forks of Long Island. The house, on the market for $18 mn, has an unmistakable Frank Lloyd Wright influence — its cascading balconies have been likened to Fallingwater.
Jaffe houses have attracted prominent owners. He designed homes for actor Alan Alda and jazz drummer Chico Hamilton. Tennis champion Björn Borg and artist Daniel Arsham later purchased his homes. Most recently, Ben Brougham, creative director at Jonathan Adler Design Studio, continued this lineage. “At one point I had another house just down the water from it and would kayak by and daydream about it,” he says of the Osofsky house.
This daydream became reality in 2020 when he purchased the house. There was a bit of work to be done. Jaffe was commissioned to build the house by Meyer Osofsky, a fashion brand founder, and his wife Aileen Osofsky, later chair of the American Contract Bridge League’s goodwill committee. Although Jaffe was influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, his composition achieved a distinctive planar abstraction.
Alastair Gordon explained this in his book Romantic Modernist: The Life and Work of Norman Jaffe, Architect, 1932-1993. “Jaffe played heaviness against lightness, transparency against opacity, thickness against thinness in a tightly controlled composition that appeared to move towards the water in a series of gradual steps. Vertical elements made from rough grey granite acted as foundations to the horizontal elements, which were clad in cedar and emerged in a succession of cantilevers — small porches, sundecks, and overhanging roof planes — pulled out like drawers in a bureau.”
Jaffe expanded the property in 1981 with a guest wing that nearly doubled the size of the house to its current scale of 5,089 square feet, with six bedrooms and eight bathrooms.
When Brougham bought the residence, it had seen little change since 1981. He set out to modernise it, aware of the scale of the challenge. He explains, “I was obviously approaching it from an angle of restoration and preservation but also wanted to make it applicable to the way we live today and the way I wanted to live in the house — or anyone else would.”
Some of these tasks were relatively simple. Tongue-and-groove teak woodwork inside was comprehensively refinished. Connecticut granite throughout the house was largely in good shape but required a few replacement stones (reused from elsewhere in the house where possible). He sought out the original manufacturer of door hardware for matching replacements.
Modern technology enabled the restoration of some original design features. The windows in the principal living areas had originally been undivided but “at some point they had to have hurricane shutters put in so you ended up with these quite ugly divides and hurricane shutters, which messed up the original architecture”, says Brougham. “By replacing those windows with modern hurricane-standard windows I was able to go back to Jaffe’s original vision of seamless glass.”
He engaged in some slight repurposing of rooms, with the most substantial alterations being the kitchens and bathrooms. He relocated the kitchen to the plot of a former laundry and maid’s room to create more space. The original kitchen was converted largely to a bar, opened up to the living room with the removal of a wall.
Harmony with the original frame was Brougham’s watchword for more expressive interventions. “When I introduced new materials I was really conscious of them making sense within the original architecture,” he says. He introduced a Moroccan tile in bathrooms, which he found resonant with the house’s original spirit of “a play on square forms”. Faucets and other elements in bathrooms were chosen from bathroom specialist Waterworks’ Bond Collection. “I often reference this house as being kind of a Bond lair or Bond villain's house so it made sense,” he jokes.
Terrazzo floors were laid in the kitchens and bathrooms. Brougham says that the material was not originally used “but I felt they played very much on that period of the house”. Cork was introduced into several walls. “I was inspired by a ’70s powder room that my grandfather had when I was growing up in England.”
Brougham found creative freedom in converting the garage into a screening room. He had been drawn into some pictures in a 1970s magazine and used the colour palette as a reference for everything: the drapery, the carpet, the walls, the sofas. “I just went with it,” he says.
The property, which sits on 1.7 acres, is for sale with Sotheby’s International Realty, East Hampton.
Photography: Geir Magnusson
