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When Tom and Bunty Armstrong bought a ramshackle summer home on Fishers Island off the Connecticut coast 27 years ago , their first move was to replace the colonial revival ’s circular driveway with a neat shooter to the front doorway .
After a devastating fervour to the Fishers Island plate of Tom and Bunty Armstrong , only the garden survived . The young menage , design by designer Tom Phifer , was built to complement the existing garden . pic by : Don Freeman .
“ I wanted a encounter with the house — straight off , ” Tom Armstrong after toldThe New York Times . If you go by his press , Armstrong ’s career as a museum director echoed his taste in driveways . A former theatre director of the Whitney Museum of American Art and a retiring chairman of the Garden Conservancy who died in June at the age of 78 , Armstrong was recognise for public clashes with curator who worked for him and with museum boards he exercise for . In mortal , however , he was charming , impeccably mannered , and often madcap — his Fishers Island house was named Hoover Hall after the superhero persona Armstrong adopted ; he often donned a cape , tights , and a vacuum - blazon T - shirt for on - island result . Confrontation , supporter say , was not a thing of temperament but a design principle .
creep retem and daffodils borders the staircase to the picnic area along the shoreline . Photo by : Don Freeman .
In December 2003 , a fire destroyed Hoover Hall . The drive Armstrong reconfigured decennary before now led to an empty rectangle of lawn and a bosque of apple trees border by a three - Accho garden . Designed by landscape architect Morgan Wheelock in 1989 and constantly improved by Armstrong , the garden had come through unhurt but orphaned . “ The garden was premised on the axes of the old house , ” says Armstrong ’s son Whitney , a Harvard - trained landscape painting designer . “ It took Dad a few month to figure out what to do . ”
succulent rows of Nipponese iris bloom each June . Photo by : Don Freeman .
As springiness occur and the garden bloomed unobstructed by Hoover Hall , Armstrong realized he had a uncommon chance to turn back the distinctive order of garden construction : He could design a theater to complement an existing garden . In doing so , he could balance the relationship between structure and garden and protect the sizable panoramas the fire produced . He would do it , in effect , by preserving the absence seizure of the old theatre .
A transparent looking glass box now stands on the blot once reside by the old colonial . Fishers Island Sound is seeable from either side , and the menage ’s steel systema skeletale melds into its silvery nautical blues and grays . “ We did n’t want the house to be the prominent feature of speech , ” says its architect , Tom Phifer . “ That ’s where the foil comes from . ”
The moss garden occupies an atrium - similar quad outside the subroutine library . Photo by : Don Freeman .
At first quite a little , Phifer ’s invention come out to float in place , sputter and slenderly lofty , but from every advantage in the garden , the home feels securely embedded . A conventional swim pool was reshaped into the water lineament that flow into the house , create a sightline from the road to the Sound . Small adjustments , like trimming the apple trees to the exact height of the Modern roof , pull the house and garden together .
Next to Phifer ’s aery building , a paddle tennis court felt out of place , so it was substitute with raw plantings . A monolithic black regular hexahedron — which in context look like modern carving but in fact is a metallic element storage shed — punctuates contorted white pine and curving seam of Japanese iris .
The master chamber at midday is cloud with light patterns created by the house ’s canopy . The nonindulgent horizontal of the hornbeam hedge , boxwood , and pathway emphasise the geometry of the house . At night , the floor - to - ceiling white Isamu Noguchi igniter sculpture — one of eight in the house — provides a soft light that smutch the home ’s sharp lines and enclose the sleeping room in a easy glow . Photo by : Don Freeman .
Though designed for the original commodious 1926 colonial , the remainder of the garden adapted easily to the modernist style of the new house . This is part because Armstrong , drawing on his long connexion with contemporaneous art , based the garden on the principle of midcentury nonfigurative house painting . “ There are essentially two unlike styles of abstraction in 20th one C art — geometric generalisation and biomorphic abstract , ” Armstrong wrote inA Singular Vision , his book about the house that was published posthumously in December . He incorporate both style of abstraction , trimming the linden allée and the boxwood and hornbeam hedges into neat logical argument that on the nose parallel the shoring and visible horizon . On the inland side of the house , he instructed Wheelock to cut up out lyrically curving paths and organically shaped “ suite , ” leaving plenty of space for him to do his own planting , primarily his beloved Narcissus pseudonarcissus . They leave untouched the boulder that erupt from the turf and reminded Armstrong of the bland , granitelike forms that show up in creative person Ellsworth Kelly ’s paintings .
When the sign of the zodiac was accomplished , Armstrong was proud of to find that its fundamental interaction with the elements also complement the two nonfigurative styles . “ We get word that the fanlight , in conjunction with the scallop ceiling , project unlike flesh on the walls , ” says Whitney . “ This super rectilinear loge micturate the light curvilinear . ”
The path to the puddle garden runs between rhododendron withCarex elata‘Bowles Golden , ’ European ginger , and blue - floweringHyacinthoides hispanica . Photo by : Don Freeman .
The mutualism of house and garden extend to the article of furniture and particularly to the art on the walls . Edward Dugmore ’s untitled 1954 canvas — an nonfigurative map of red smudged with blue and yellow — is meant to be rent in with the cherry-red blooms of Coleus ‘ Big Red Judy ’ and Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘ Firetail ’ in the background . The standout antique Nipponese screen is a foil for the American artwork in the house but also fetch landscape painting into the Interior Department . Outside , a flagged path bends in imitation of the bridge depicted on the screen .
Very minuscule was result to chance , from the color of the rock hold back bulwark — both when dry and when wetted by rain — to the robustious beach pink wine . “ Dad want them cautiously cut back layer to emphasize the incline of the land to the apparent horizon , ” says Whitney .
by from the rigorous modern lines of the home , the garden ’s curves assert themselves in mildly winding bed and paths , the snaking trunk of beloved locust trees , and the loot of pruned hydrangea drift over the circumference wall . Photo by : Don Freeman .
The meticulousness that makes this 2nd house a masterwork also made Armstrong who he was . Whitney recently find a will to his father ’s scrupulous care to item while separate through the latter ’s effect : luncheon seating system Armstrong filed off year before . Now Whitney and his sib struggle with the demand of maintaining the property — from ordering hundreds of annuals each year to keeping alga off the retaining wall . But they can take comfort in knowing their efforts are more curatorial than janitorial . They are continue a place where art and architecture , landscape and sea , process an uppity idea of high civilization . A friend who often visited both Hoover Hall and Armstrong ’s new house says simply , “ It ’s his last museum . ”
This article first come out as " One Last Hurrah " in our April 2012 issue .
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