Architecture | Fishers Island House Design in New York by Thomas Phifer and Partners

Thomas Phifer and Partners designed the Fishers Island House in New York. In the animated interplay between landscape and art, in the shifting ambiguities between inside and out, the design achieves exceptional balance.

Architecture - Fishers Island House Design in New York by Thomas Phifer and Partners

Architecture - Cleany Kitchen Fishers Island House Design in New York by Thomas Phifer and Partners

Architecture - Interior of Fishers Island House Design in New York by Thomas Phifer and Partners

Architecture - Mini Garden Indoor Fishers Island House Design in New York by Thomas Phifer and Partners

Architecture - View at Afternoon in Fishers Island House Design in New York by Thomas Phifer and Partners

Just behind the copse stands a delicately transparent pavilion. Its light-filtering trellis—a horizontal tracery of slender aluminum rods extending the roof plane—aligns with the canopy of trees before it. Woven into the landscape, this is an architecture of subtlety, a precisely grounded yet quasi-weightless structure, an ethereal rectangle, planted between two existing woods. Like feathery fronds, the trellis reaches toward the bordering leafy branches, while the pavilion’s interior floor plane—fully visible through the glassy, Miesian shell—continues outward, its surface of ebonized bamboo transformed into an exterior plinth of Indian black granite, a walkway, finely striated with shadows from the diaphanous, metal canopy above.

A perimeter path lines the structure’s transparent shell. Freestanding in parallel alignment, the interior walls never meet the enclosure. Instead, they form a virtual box within a box, an implied inner volume. These parallel planes channel long vistas out toward water and garden, only allowing the seascape’s wide, rugged panorama to emerge in full view at the house’s far side.

More than a one-bedroom retreat for a former museum director and his wife, this is also a place of extraordinary 20th century paintings, sculptures, and glassware—much of it conveying a sense of buoyancy or levitation that echoes the pavilion’s lightness. The artwork always figures into view out, even if only peripherally. Conversely, from the gardens, this colorful indoor collection projects a presence outdoors.

Visit the Thomas Phifer and Partners website

Photography by Scott Frances