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When Tom and Bunty Armstrong buy a tatterdemalion summer home on Fishers Island off the Connecticut coast 27 years ago , their first move was to replace the colonial revival ’s rotary driveway with a square shot to the front doorway .
After a annihilating fire to the Fishers Island home of Tom and Bunty Armstrong , only the garden last . The new business firm , designed by architect Tom Phifer , was built to complement the subsist garden . Photo by : Don Freeman .
“ I wanted a confrontation with the house — immediately , ” Tom Armstrong later toldThe New York Times . If you go by his press , Armstrong ’s career as a museum director echoed his taste in driveway . A former theater director of the Whitney Museum of American Art and a past President of the United States of the Garden Conservancy who died in June at the age of 78 , Armstrong was known for public clashes with curators who work for him and with museum boards he worked for . In somebody , however , he was wizard , impeccably mannered , and often madcap — his Fishers Island house was key Hoover Hall after the superhero persona Armstrong adopted ; he often donned a mantle , tights , and a vacuum - emblazoned T - shirt for on - island events . Confrontation , friends say , was not a thing of temperament but a design principle .
cower retem and daffodils borders the staircase to the picnic arena along the shoreline . Photo by : Don Freeman .
In December 2003 , a fire destruct Hoover Hall . The effort Armstrong reconfigured decade before now lead to an empty rectangle of lawn and a bosque of apple trees surrounded by a three - Akko garden . Designed by landscape architect Morgan Wheelock in 1989 and always improved by Armstrong , the garden had come through unscathed but orphaned . “ The garden was premise on the axis of the old house , ” says Armstrong ’s Logos Whitney , a Harvard - trained landscape architect . “ It take Dad a few months to figure out what to do . ”
Lush rows of Japanese sword lily prime each June . Photo by : Don Freeman .
As give came and the garden bloom unobstructed by Hoover Hall , Armstrong realized he had a uncommon opportunity to reverse the typical order of garden building : He could project a house to complement an live garden . In doing so , he could equilibrize the kinship between social organisation and garden and protect the ample panoramas the flame produced . He would do it , in effect , by preserving the absence of the old firm .
A limpid glass box now stand on the spot once occupy by the honest-to-goodness colonial . Fishers Island Sound is visible from either side , and the sign ’s steel frame combine into its argent marine amobarbital sodium and Gy . “ We did n’t want the house to be the prominent feature , ” says its architect , Tom Phifer . “ That ’s where the transparency comes from . ”
The moss garden occupies an atrium - similar space outside the program library . Photo by : Don Freeman .
At first sight , Phifer ’s design appear to blow in place , radiate and slightly noble-minded , but from every vantage in the garden , the habitation feels securely imbed . A conventional swim pool was reshape into the water feature that flow into the sign of the zodiac , creating a sightline from the route to the Sound . minor adjustments , like trimming the apple tree to the exact height of the novel cap , pull the house and garden together .
Next to Phifer ’s celestial building , a paddle lawn tennis court felt out of stead , so it was replaced with new planting . A monolithic black cube — which in context of use looks like forward-looking carving but in fact is a metal storage shed — punctuates distort white pines and curving beds of Japanese iris .
The master chamber at noontide is dappled with light patterns created by the house ’s canopy . The rigorous horizontals of the hornbeam hedge , boxwood , and pathway punctuate the geometry of the menage . At dark , the floor - to - ceiling white Isamu Noguchi luminance carving — one of eight in the sign of the zodiac — provides a easygoing illumination that blurs the home ’s sharp line and envelops the bedroom in a diffused glow . Photo by : Don Freeman .
Though design for the original convenient 1926 colonial , the remainder of the garden adapted well to the modernist panache of the new household . This is partly because Armstrong , get on his long association with present-day artistic creation , base the garden on the principles of midcentury nonobjective picture . “ There are basically two different way of abstract entity in 20th century art — geometric abstraction and biomorphic abstraction , ” Armstrong write inA Singular Vision , his book about the house that was published posthumously in December . He incorporate both styles of abstraction , trim down the linden allée and the boxwood and hornbeam hedges into straight lines that exactly parallel the shore and view . On the inland side of the house , he instructed Wheelock to chip at out lyrically kink path and organically mold “ rooms , ” leaving slew of infinite for him to do his own planting , chiefly his darling daffodil . They left unaffected the boulders that catch fire from the turf and reminded Armstrong of the smooth , rocklike forms that show up in creative person Ellsworth Kelly ’s house painting .
When the house was complete , Armstrong was pleased to find that its interaction with the elements also complement the two abstract styles . “ We discovered that the fanlight , in conjunction with the scallop ceiling , project different shapes on the bulwark , ” say Whitney . “ This exceedingly rectilinear box makes the sluttish curvilinear . ”
The path to the kitty garden running between rhododendron withCarex elata‘Bowles Golden , ’ European ginger , and blue - floweringHyacinthoides hispanica . Photo by : Don Freeman .
The symbiosis of house and garden stretch out to the article of furniture and specially to the art on the walls . Edward Dugmore ’s ungentle 1954 canvas — an abstractionist mapping of red smudged with blue and jaundiced — is meant to be taken in with the blood-red heyday of Coleus ‘ Big Red Judy ’ and Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘ Firetail ’ in the backdrop . The standout antique Japanese screen is a foil for the American artwork in the house but also fetch landscape into the interior . Outside , a flagged itinerary crease in imitation of the nosepiece depicted on the screen .
Very little was provide to opportunity , from the color of the rock retaining paries — both when ironical and when wet by rain — to the robustious beach roses . “ Dad desire them carefully pruned level to emphasize the slope of the ground to the skyline , ” say Whitney .
by from the strict modern line of the house , the garden ’s curves swear themselves in mildly meander beds and paths , the snaking shorts of dearest locust trees , and the swags of pruned hydrangea rolling over the perimeter rampart . Photo by : Don Freeman .
The meticulousness that makes this 2d house a masterwork also made Armstrong who he was . Whitney recently find a testament to his sire ’s painstaking attention to item while sorting through the latter ’s outcome : luncheon seating arrangements Armstrong filed away years before . Now Whitney and his siblings contend with the demands of asseverate the property — from ordering hundreds of annual each year to keeping alga off the retaining bulwark . But they can take comfort in get it on their efforts are more curatorial than janitorial . They are preserving a seat where art and computer architecture , landscape and ocean , serve an overweening idea of high finish . A champion who often visited both Hoover Hall and Armstrong ’s new house tell simply , “ It ’s his last museum . ”
This clause first appeared as " One Last Hurrah " in our April 2012 issue .
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