When Alison Rose says, “The spaceship has landed,” she’s talking about a custom sofa that’s stationed akimbo in the living room of a Sag Harbor home she recently designed for a young family. However, her otherworldly metaphor might as well represent the whole project. Amid a lush beachfront landscape of oak leaf hydrangea, boxwood, and hornbeam, this modern-style new build is probably the only home on Long Island’s East End where a braided-rope “tail” is a freakish appendage to a “mustachioed” rug, or where light fixtures recall the blobby sway of deep-ocean creatures. Notably, the color palette vacillates comfortably between high-desert hues and pop art punch.
Rose’s client, Mara, a gut-health specialist and Ayurvedic nutritionist, grew up in Miami, and wanted her family’s second home to reflect “the brightness and vibe” of her native stomping grounds. “Every room needed to be approachable, usable, and fun, fun, fun,” says Mara, who shares the retreat with her husband, Brian, who works in real estate, and their two young children.
Mara commissioned Rose after becoming spellbound by the New York designer’s marble geometric tiles—a collaboration with Artistic Tile—at the 2019 Kips Bay Decorator Show House, where they emblazoned a boudoir. In Sag Harbor, Rose’s fearless way with form spins geometry on its rigid head. Furniture qualifies as objets d’art and exaggeratedly occupies spaces, apropos a home that’s designed “to envelop you in wonder and curiosity,” Rose says. She credits her knack for scale and spectacle to frequent childhood visits to The Met and the American Museum of Natural History.
For example, a tiny Tim Nikiforuk canvas, hanging on a hazy purple expanse in the media room, makes a big impact with its tempting texture—thick swirls of teal paint that suggest an exuberant extrusion of ribbon candy or striped toothpaste. With the flourish of a giant straw hat, a pendant lamp of woven willow vine from Ukrainian gallery Faina adds breeziness to the primary bedroom, while Rose’s custom bed features a theatrical headboard reminiscent of a pudgy clamshell. More Neptunian novelty can be found in the sea green family room, where, Rose says, “I wanted to introduce a ‘creature.’” In this case, an anemone of Dr. Seussian proportions portrayed by a pink floor lamp from Brooklyn-based Opiary.
The family room is also where the above-named rug—Rose likens its yellow festooned motif to a handlebar mustache—is growing its plaited ponytail, the swishiest of the design’s menagerie of oddities. While we’re at it, the most barnacled curio would be a kitchen vase by Fernanda Pompermayer that looks like gilded treasure extracted from a sunken pirate ship. And the most puzzling piece is Jason Miller’s Fiddlehead ceiling light, cantilevered off a wall in the breakfast room. Its graceful steel arc conjures a fern’s unfurling arm cradling a bead of dew. “People are fascinated by it,” Rose says.
If the tableau’s offbeat spontaneity feels somewhat postmodern, the motley and optimistic color palette plays no small part. Lavender—Rose’s go-to hue—appears in shades ranging from beamy to dusky. Electric blue dining chairs by Sancal channel the spirit of postwar French artist Yves Klein. The primary bedroom is enveloped in a scorched terra-cotta tone, reminiscent of family vacations in Arizona and an earthy counterpoint to the celestial luminosity of the primary bath, clad in Bianco Dolomiti marble slabs. A glossy sunset hue on the walls of the daughter’s bedroom tributes Mara and Brian’s meet-cute in a New York City elevator.
“I was taken by his beautiful navy suit, which had an orange silk liner,” Mara recalls. Four years later, on the anniversary of their fateful encounter, Brian proposed to Mara in the same lift. “Hard to believe that was 16 years and 2 kids ago.” Time flies when you’re living in color.