Imagine a place for making things: a simple room, with little but the tools you need and the ideal never-too-bright light. That’s what the painter and creative director Patrick McDonough dreamed about while cooped up in the ranch-style home he shares in the Springs section of far eastern Long Island with his partner, Michael Burst, who runs Hudson River Flowers in Manhattan. McDonough bought the weekend house in 1996, but it wasn’t until the couple started spending more time there during the pandemic that he felt it needed a dedicated spot where he could, he says, “get messy” making his vibrant landscapes in gouache and oil paint.
They also wanted somewhere to park their car, a nearly 18-foot-long 1966 Chevy Impala Super Sport convertible. Researching bespoke garages online, the couple discovered the work of another couple, Max Worrell and Jejon Yeung, two architects in their 40s who, after meeting in their Yale graduate program, co-founded the firm Worrell Yeung in 2015. Several years ago in upstate New York, they had built a Japanese-and-Scandinavian-influenced minimalist annex with space for their clients to relax — and to store their vintage Ford Bronco. It was exactly what Burst, 62, and McDonough, 67, pictured for themselves.
If that one looked like a barn, this one’s more like a cabin — an 800-square-foot, two-floor structure (the parking space, with radiant floor heating, is below; the painting studio, above) that was deceptively complicated to build. “That’s a common thread in our work,” Yeung says. “We spend a lot of time and effort to make it look like we didn’t.” First, the architects had to secure permits in famously strict East Hampton, where, according to Worrell, “if you’re going to build an ‘artist’s studio,’ you have to prove you’re an artist.” The contractors also weren’t allowed to move or harm any trees, which forced them to situate the 13½-by-30-foot building in a small clearing in front of the main house; now connected to the studio via a foyer, its exterior is clad in horizontal boards of black-painted pine that unite the entire residence. All the new interior walls — even those in the downstairs powder room, stained an Yves Klein blue — are made from soft-grained Baltic birch plywood.
But the biggest challenge was inherent to the design: a 360-degree wraparound ribbon of four-foot-tall windows that horizontally bisect the entire studio, as if its peaked roof had been sliced clean and then sutured back on with glass. The effect, achieved by engineering almost imperceptibly thin steel support columns in line with the window mullions, gives the 12-foot-tall room a floating, weightless sensation, “like a cloud,” McDonough says, especially because the ceiling is painted white. The windows are four feet off the floor, high enough that you can barely see the neighbors when sitting in the studio. What you can see are conifers, birds and an ocean-fed creek — the exact things that first drew McDonough here to paint, and that also attracted artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler and Jane Freilicher to the area over the years. “When I’m out on Long Island, I’d have to wear a blindfold to avoid the landscape,” Freilicher once said. “It’s the very air one breathes.”
