A few years earlier, we packed our belongings onto the Amtrak train in San Francisco and ten days later, we picked them up from Penn Station in New York City.
It wasn’t my first time in New York City; I had spent two weeks there 10 years earlier in my twenties while on an eight-month trip around America. That time, it was the Greyhound Bus that delivered me to Penn Station. A taxi pulled up on Bowery outside the Bowery Hotel. A porter came to take our bags, and I wondered how we had managed to secure such a fancy hotel. At check-in, we were kindly directed across the road to the Bowery Whitehouse hostel where our booking was held. In 2014 it was the number one search result for “worst hotel NYC” and at the time, it felt like the worst hotel on earth. I lasted a night before moving on. Now, with a bit more life experience behind me, I understand that it was a single residence occupancy or ‘flophouse’. For an affordable price tag, a person could have a safe space, a roof over their head, within the urban environment that they knew. Many people have told the stories of the flophouses, buildings such as the Sunshine Hotel, Providence Hotel and my hotel for the night, the Whitehouse Hotel. In 2018, The New York Times wrote a story of Sir Shadow, a 70-year-old artist and poet. Sir Shadow lived at the Whitehouse Hotel since 1995 where he slept diagonally to fit within the cubicle. His art form was self-titled ‘flowetry’, a form of continuous line pen drawings of musicians. The New York Times article wrote that almost every hallway and room of the Whitehouse contained a Sir Shadow mural.
Now, I was renting an apartment on E 11St, mere minutes from the Whitehouse Hostel. I found a job in Tribeca and every day I would walk 30 minutes each way, crossing the downtown avenues Past St Mark’s church, heading diagonally up Stuyvesant Street, via the truncated building at the corner of 10St. Through Astor Place and left on Broadway before making a quick right on Waverly Place. Every day I crossed Washington Square Park diagonally, from corner to corner. A short walk up Bleecker to Carmine, before taking a left on Varick where the WeWork was located. I did this every day, without fail, even in the heaviest of snowstorms.
Working at Burr Salvatore introduced me to new references and new contexts. I was enchanted by the whimsical shingle-clad architecture of modern architecture firms such as Ike Kligerman Barkley (IKB). Their shingles danced around roof forms, creating curves and forms as though they were moulded from plasticine. I fell in love with IKB’s Shinglish Country House, with its deep, low eaves and brick buttresses. I was introduced to the architecture of Edwin Lutyens, an English architect working in the 1880s who imaginatively adapted traditional styles to suit the requirements of his era.
On Long Island, the shingle-style house rose to popularity during the late 19th century, borrowing elements from architectural styles of the past, including Queen Anne and Colonial Revival. The weathered nature of shingles evokes images of seaside homes from Newport to Nantucket, immortalised in movies like Something’s Gotta Give.
At House on the Atlantic, the house rose out of the dunes, a heavy stone base anchoring it in place. Each space in the house was designed to be used every day, without hierarchy but with intention. A casual dining space opens directly onto the pool terrace, inviting barefoot movement between indoors and out. The kitchen, streamlined, sunlit and welcoming became the gravitational centre for daily life. Upstairs, long corridors became sequences of moments: study nooks for growing children, a place to pause and watch the dunes shift in the wind.
Are you designing a space for a life that’s still unfolding? Do you need your home to be both grounded in tradition and flexible enough to adapt with time? I’d love to share what I learned from the House on the Atlantic story to help shape the next chapter in yours. Reach out if the ideas in this project resonate with the story you're beginning to write.
