Sedacca House

Number three of The New York Five, Charles Gwathmey designed the Sedacca House in 1968, following the success of the beach house he designed for his parents in Amagansett, New York that brought him to public attention.

Charles Gwathmey's Sedacca House in East Hampton, New York. Courtesy of Sotheby's International Realty.

In designing Sedacca—the first of his commissioned projects—Gwathmey simultaneously determined the structure, furnishings and paint colors, creating an architectural blueprint heavily overlaid with paint chips, fabric swatches and examples of furniture cut out of newspaper advertisements. In effect, Gwathmey, who died in 2009, created an architectural corollary to Florence Knoll’s paste-ups, which she used to revolutionize the approach to interior planning in the 1940s and 50s.

“[In] the plans [...] the 30-year-old architect had pasted cut-out advertisements for the furniture and their prices: dining room chairs, $75; the black leather easy chairs, $200.”

—Tracie Rozhon

Charles Gwathmey's Sedacca House in East Hampton, New York. Courtesy of Sotheby's International Realty.

Tracie Rozhon, an architectural critic at The New York Times, first unearthed the building set in 1993. She writes: “Unrolling the plans, [one] sees paint chips scotch-taped to the blueprints: the canary yellow used on the pocket door to the little guest suite, the parrot green for the door to the separate storage shed and the Gray Cloud stain used for just about everything else. The 30-year-old architect had pasted cut-out advertisements for the furniture and their prices: dining room chairs, $75; the black leather easy chairs, $200.”

Charles Gwathmey's Sedacca House in East Hampton, New York. Courtesy of Sotheby's International Realty.

In the recently renovated two-story house, the leather lounge chairs, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Barcelona Chairs, remain, paired with the glass-and-steel Barcelona Coffee Table they were designed to complement. As a second-wave modernist, Gwathmey often incorporated Mies van der Rohe’s furnishings in his projects, invoking the purist forms espoused by the early modernist architect. Accordingly, adjacent to living room set-up, a built-in dining table consists of a sheet of “marble, anchored to the floor by a thin vertical piece of shiny steel,” surrounded by Mies’ black leather Brno Chairs.

“[It] broke the mold of the vernacular, shingle-style house and showed for the first time a modern house that was not imitative or historicist.”

—Charles Gwathmey

Charles Gwathmey's Sedacca House in East Hampton, New York. Courtesy of Sotheby's International Realty.

The dining and living areas were put into an open-plan configuration to save space, accommodating the request of the home’s client, Joe Sedecca, who asked for just “two bedrooms and a wonderful kitchen.” The home’s high-ceiling, large clerestory windows and minimal furnishings prevent the residence from feeling cramped, as does the couch that runs the length of the far wall, combining adaptability with economy of space.

When he was alive, Gwathmey said of the landmark house, “[It] broke the mold of the vernacular, shingle-style house and showed for the first time a modern house that was not imitative or historicist.”

Project Credits

Design: Charles Gwathmey
Photography: Sotheby's International Realty