Zest For Light

A Sag Harbor house provides designer with the seed of a bright idea 

Rare is the interior decorator who takes inspiration from her clients. In most instances, it’s the other way around. You hire    a designer in the hope they’ll create a space in which you’ll feel equipped – inspired – to cope with the world. Yet when Jessica Gersten was working on the Sag Harbor home of a married couple with three children, their joie de vivre carried over into the choices she made for the project – and into her own design practice (more on the latter later). 

“They wanted a fun approach,” says Gersten of the seven-bedroom, six thousand-square-foot new-build, a contemporary structure with wood shingles and windows framed in steel-colored wood. She describes the homeowners, with whom she’d worked on previous projects, as “design risk-takers” who brought her on to introduce a bit of whimsy to the space. “It’s a tight package,” she says. “The palette, the layout, the general scheme – it all flows because the homeowners weren’t afraid of bold strokes.” 

Exhibit A: a caterpillar-like leather sectional by De Sede that serves as both focal point and foil for the other pieces in the room. “That sofa was the starting point,” says Gersten. “I needed something big and bold to fill what was essentially a living room-and-a-half. And since we weren’t going to do multiple seating areas, it had to be super-durable.”

The contours of a set of nesting Travertine cocktail tables that Gersten designed reflect those of the sofa. And then there is a pair of outsize armchairs that just happen to swivel, adding another “playful yet practical element to the room,” says Gersten.

At an angle from a window overlooking the garden is a forged-iron swing in the shape of a great circle. The custom-fabricated piece simultaneously brings to mind a site-specific sculpture –one that should be hanging from the bough of a tree – and a functional artwork that looks entirely at home (Gersten says the younger members of the family make frequent use of it). “A lot of people would have shied away from having a swing in the room, but when I suggested it, they were, like, Great!”

In keeping with the laid-back theme, she kitted out the family room with a pair of slouchy armchairs by Craft Associates and a round Object & Ideas coffee table, a 1st Dibs find, and her own Uman plaster and leather ceiling pendant. The effect is one of stylistic cohesion, in which each piece exists in kinship with the other.

The same is true of the dining room, which features rich dark hues, a subtle reference to the window trim… “A dark dining room makes a really bold statement,” says Gersten, “and the clients let us run with it.” She offset the inky palette with a pale oak table of her own design paired with Lawson Fenning chairs covered in Nobilis fabric. A run of custom conical pendants fabricated from shaved stone add a finishing touch of drama to the moody space.

But the project’s most striking elements are the steel-and-wood staircase in the center of the house – another reference to the exterior trim – and the massive, looping rope pendant light that illuminates the double-height stairwell, both of which Gersten designed herself. Regarding the first, she says, “It was very important to have a really strong center point from which everything else in the house radiated out.”

Now about that rope pendant light. Gersten wanted something that would catch the eye from every vantage – from the outside, the inside, upstairs and downstairs. To achieve this, she created lots of layers with macramé ropes that dip in a way that resembles writing in the air. “It’s super-versatile and it does all this funky stuff. It can drop down to the floor.” The results of her handiwork pleased Gersten so much that she went on to create her own rope-light collection inspired by that initial design and now available via Una Malan. The pieces are made in Portugal, in a town north of Porto, and both the rope-work and the glass spheres are made by hand. She also recently launched Lusitano, a collection of elegantly proportioned horsehair-trimmed chairs and loungers sold through the art and design gallery STUDIOTWENTYSEVEN. Bold strokes indeed.

Photography By Nicole Franzen