At the end of a long, secluded pathway in Bridgehampton, New York, Alex Logsdail found the intimate modernist home he had been searching for in 2019.
“It was like a sanctuary, very private and simple,” says Logsdail, the 36-year-old CEO of Lisson Gallery, founded in the 1960s in London by his father, Nicholas Logsdail, nephew of the eccentric author Roald Dahl. In 2016, the younger Logsdail took the reins from his father and has since overseen the opening of Lisson’s two New York City spaces in Chelsea as well as the gallery’s expansion into Asia.
Of course, Logsdail had no way of knowing when he purchased his Hamptons getaway that within months he and his partner, Skylar Pittman, would soon be quarantining in it for almost a year. With many of his clients now living nearby, having decamped from the city, he shifted his strategy. He opened an outpost of the gallery in East Hampton. Meanwhile, his home became an extension of his art program. “Essentially, everything inside the house is from my personal collection, and everything outside the house is for sale,” says Logsdail, leading a tour through the breezy open-plan interior and around the grounds installed with sculpture by Lisson artists including Carmen Herrera, Anish Kapoor, Tony Cragg, Pedro Reyes, Richard Long, Lee Ufan, and Hélio Oiticica.
Clad in weathered wood, the minimalist flat-roofed structure features a wall of sliding glass doors that open onto the pool and sculpture garden. It was built in 1985 by the local architect Bill Chaleff as an eco-home, supporting an earthen berm on the roof to modulate climate. In 2002, another gallery owner, David Maupin, and editor Stefano Tonchi bought the house and worked with the landscape designer Edwina von Gal to add the pool and excavate the home from its sodden roof, exposing dramatic wooden beams and girders. Tonchi and Maupin added black travertine flooring and raw plywood walls and cabinetry throughout the home, details influenced by Rem Koolhaas, whom Maupin had commissioned to design Lehmann Maupin’s gallery spaces.
“There’s a purity to the materials—everything in the house is wood, glass, or stone,” says Logsdail. Working with a contractor, he has since made his own changes to the property. A small freestanding garage was converted into a discrete viewing room with retractable glass doors, where Logsdail has met with clients since the start of the pandemic. He bought a shipping container to relocate his clutter, emptied from the garage, and clad the utilitarian unit in weathered wood to match the other modular structures on the property. For Pittman, a partner at the photo agency SN37, the poolhouse morphed into a pandemic office. The couple, who recently got engaged, hosted outdoor gatherings beside the pool throughout the pandemic, including a dinner last June honoring the sculptor Hugh Hayden after his gallery opening and catered by the cooking collective Ghetto Gastro.
For the interior, Logsdail drew up designs for the beds and a cocktail table, inspired by the plywood boxes of the artist Donald Judd, and had them fabricated in birch by his gallery’s plinth maker. Vibrant abstract geometric paintings by Herrera, Stanley Whitney, Marina Adams, and Cory Arcangel pop against the neutral palette of the architecture and furnishings.
Pittman’s photographer father, Dustin Pittman, has been documenting New York’s fashion and music scenes since the late 1960s, and the dining area is lined with his black-and-white photographs of Mick Jagger, Yves Saint Laurent, Lou Reed, and Halston. A grid of 16 Edie Sedgwick headshots produced as an Andy Warhol screen test by another of his “superstars,” Gerard Malanga, was Pittman’s gift to his daughter for her 18th birthday. Malanga also photographed Pittman’s father walking in a field with the late actress Sylvia Miles—an image that is now displayed in the couple’s bedroom.
In the poolhouse, a wall piece by Lawrence Weiner reads: “Logs Bound Together” underscored by a black line. “A raft is literally logs bound together, floating on the water,” says Logsdail, who co-owns the piece with his father and was close to the artist, who died in December. “But it’s also a play on our name, Logsdail, because we are bound together, which I think is quite beautiful.”
Correction: An earlier version of the article misstated Alex Logsdail’s title. He is the CEO of Lisson gallery, not the executive director.
This story originally appeared in the March 2022 issue of ELLE DECOR. SUBSCRIBE
