Two years ago, when Richard and Carole Rifkind bought a 1970s Cape Cod-style house in Amagansett, N.Y., they chose it for its location-a 5-minute walk to the bus, market and beach-and not for its design.
The house, to be perfectly blunt, was ugly.
“It had no architecture,” said Carole Rifkind, an architectural historian and the author of “A Field Guide to American Architecture” (New American Library, $24.95).
The house had tiny windows and tiny, dark rooms. The front entrance was little more than that: two steps, one concrete, the other brick. No overhang. No stoop.
What the house needed was charm. Instant heritage. A proper entrance, a porch for eating outside and shelves for books. The idea was to make the house look as if it had always been there.
“It was to have no period, but to have many periods,” said Richard Rifkind, a medical researcher.
To give the 1,900-square-foot house its look-of-ages, the Rifkinds could have done what Ralph Lauren does in his stores: add wood paneling, moldings and portraits of ancestors (their own or somebody else’s). But that seemed ostentatious. So, instead, they hired Kevin Walz, a Manhattan designer. Together they created a mythical potato farmer who had lived in the house a hundred years ago and who, over the years, had added bits and pieces to it-a bookcase here, a picture molding there.
Through this imaginative collaboration, the three had walls knocked down and windows replaced, opening up the house to make it light and airy. They chose soft, subtle colors like face-powder pink and bayberry green to make it look warm and lived in.
And when the Rifkinds moved into the house this summer, they discovered that it possessed more than instant heritage. It had delight.
Artificial aging
At first glance, the house looks old. Walz aged it by giving it “memories”-ghostly layers and shadows of paint that make the house appear as if it has been repainted many times.
On the exterior, the designer first removed cheap wooden shutters but left the stained shadow of where they had been. Immediately, the house had a past-a time when there were shutters. Instead of painting the cedar shingles, Walz used gray stain, which will be absorbed into the wood and look old.
For the rear of the house, Walz designed a cozy porch-with a sensuous difference. Instead of covering the porch with a traditional roof of asphalt fiberglass, he designed a roof of copper sheets, which overlap one another but are set an inch apart to let in the light and breezes. And on rainy days when the Rifkinds sit on the porch, they can hear the water rat-a-tat-tatting against the roof. In a few years, the copper will turn the green of verdigris.
Inside the house, the paint has been applied to produce an artful illusion of age. The imaginary farmer has been at work. The walls are spackled for a rough-hewn texture. The wood floors have been painted in layers, as if they had been redone by the farmer over the years.
On the living room floor, three gray-green squares are painted. Each square, which delineates a seating area, is bordered in a pale, creamy color, with the faintest hint of gray-green. The bottom layer of each square is dark green, and on top are three layers of translucent gray-green glazes. The final coat is a yellowing varnish.
“It makes the floor look older, yet gives it a shine and protection,” Walz said.
“Historically, it’s as if somebody had a carpet, or three, on the floor, and when he removed the carpets, the darker color was what was left where the carpets had been-and the pale edges were the sun-bleached areas,” Richard Rifkind said.
But the room lacked something.
It was a built-in bookcase, a simple one made of boards, nails and a sheet of tin, not late-20th Century Sheetrock. For posts, the designer chose kiln-dried Douglas fir and had it rough-sawed to look old. The new nailheads were rusted before they were installed, neatly hammered from one side of the tin wall-the side facing the hallway-to the other, where the posts serve as both structural columns and shelves.
Artistic teamwork
At the far end of the kitchen, the original house had a brick wall and a fireplace. The bricks, new in 1970, had been made to look aged. Some were painted unevenly, others were slapped with tar. Tear it down? Walz said no.
The wall became a burst of color. It was painted with plaster mixed with a salmon latex paint and water, and then sanded to mute the color and to allow bits of the brick to peek through.
Paint performed magical illusions on the furniture. If the potato farmer had painted furniture in the early 1900s, he might have ordered milk paint through the mail. Packaged as a powder, it was mixed with milk and water, and when applied, it gave a soft, streaky effect. Walz chose yellow milk paint to make 10 new Windsor chairs look old.
Although Walz, working with his clients, and with the imaginary farmer, conceived the design of the house, the Rifkinds chose the colors, fabrics, paintings and all of the furniture, most of which came from flea markets and auctions.
“Kevin doesn’t control,” Carole Rifkind said. “He has a gentleness, a sense of playfulness.”
The textiles-chintzes for chairs, quilts for beds-are antique but in pristine condition.
In the living room, Carole Rifkind covered a daybed in antique red and white striped cotton ticking.
“We wanted to collect stuff,” Richard Rifkind said, “but we didn’t want an antique house. We didn’t want to live in a museum.”
Old mixes with new
In the four bedrooms-one on the ground floor, three upstairs-the beds are covered in antique quilts.
The kitchen juxtaposes modern equipment with an old-fashioned design. Most modern kitchens are built-in and of a single style. Turn-of-the-century ones were not-a stove stood by itself, the hearth was a distance away.
Here, there are two sinks, one stainless steel, the other soapstone. The first is hard and shiny; the other soft and dark and, although new, aging quickly. There are two tiny nicks in its front, and the slate-gray color will darken over time.
Walz designed a center island to resemble an old farm table. The base is cherry and the top maple, but the sink it holds is stainless steel. He designed a dining table edged in pine, with a top of tarred fir plywood, inset with a rectangle of cherry. Why would anyone tar a tabletop?
“By the sea, piers and jetties are tarred, which protects the wood from rotting from the salt water,” Walz explained. The table, a 5-minute walk from the ocean, is hardly in danger of salt water rot. But the tarred wood has texture, like the spackled, painted walls. Above the table hangs another Walz design, an acid-etched light fixture, which the designer said resembles a trough.
Even the light switches are a glimpse backward in time. They are not modern and silent. They’re noisy. The designer chose gray steel barn switches, which click loudly when turned on or off.
“There’s no sneaking around in this house at night,” Richard Rifkind said.
