There are a few things Charles Forberg—son-in-law of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius—got right when he designed a home for a sculptor and her husband along the Accabonac Harbor in East Hampton, New York, in the 1990s.

Stark concrete walls. Eye-catching triangular roofs. A site with a view of a salt marsh straight out of a fairy tale.

“It was unlike anything else,” says Brooklyn-based set designer Dina Goldman, thinking back to the first time she viewed the home in 2022, just days after it hit the market.

Before: Exterior

Around then, she and her husband, Drew Kunin, a sound engineer, had made the difficult decision to sell a proudly idiosyncratic—but increasingly falling-apart—summer home that her parents built in Bridgehampton when she was a child. While she hadn’t always intended to sell the property, she and Drew felt the surrounding hamlet had been losing character as loose local laws allowed for smaller cottages to be bought up by developers who were eager to build large, showy homes. As Drew recalls, living in the “Glamour Hamptons” didn’t feel right for film-industry creatives, who were just hungry for community.

Over in the nearby, famously artsy hamlet of Springs, the newly available Forberg home presented the perfect opportunity for a fresh start.

Or at least, nearly perfect.

“The house itself felt like this incredible sculpture in the landscape,” says architect John Berg, whose firm, Berg Design Architecture, was hired by the couple when they purchased the home. “Forberg just missed the mark on what would connect the spaces to the landscape—and some livability issues.”

After: Exterior

The biggest issue? Arguably the triangular roofline, which—striking as it was from the outside—created a hazard for anyone on the second floor who got too close.

“There were a lot of places to bang your head,” Berg says.

After agonizing over shapes and angles, Berg, along with the firm’s studio director, Alex Chaintreuil, designed a pair of oversize dormer windows that project outward from the sloped roof. The effect was a dramatic increase in the amount of walking space on the second level.

At first, Dina was skeptical, wondering if dormers would feel dated or overly traditional in the home’s context. Now, she refers to the renovation’s signature moves as, “the big, Berg Design fabulousness.”

Before: Living Room, Kitchen, and Deck

Unfortunately, the second floor wasn’t the home’s only tight space.

On the ground level, a series of glass openings in the living room leading out to the deck measured only six feet and eight inches tall—an oddly short clearance for a room with a 25-foot ceiling.

“Our son would clear it, and his hair would touch,” Drew recalls.

Similarly, the adjacent kitchen was closed off from the main living space and had ceilings that measured only seven feet tall. Even the deck felt strangely truncated, lacking the space to fit a full dining table without the risk of diners falling off the edge.

After: Living Room, Kitchen, and Deck

The couple wanted the cooking, dining, and living spaces to feel connected, so Berg and his team focused on freeing things up wherever they could. The glass openings to the deck were raised to nine feet. The walls that concealed the kitchen were torn down and replaced with a sleek island. And the width of the deck was extended by a small-but-mighty couple of feet.

Before: Office, Den, and Stairs

After: Office, Den, and Stairs

The renovation also included other, more subtle upgrades. Perforated metal panels soften the sides of an original second-floor bridge that connects an upstairs secondary bedroom to the study. A Japanese-inspired wooden screen showcases a once-concealed, double-railing spiral staircase.

The remaining finishes resulted from careful decisions by the couple. “We sourced every tile. We sourced every fixture,” Dina says. Some elements, like wood for the millwork in the kitchen, were from as far afield as Lithuania.

Before: Studio, Breezeway, and Bedroom

As Forberg originally designed the home, one could walk from the kitchen and living areas, across an exposed breezeway, and into a light-filled pottery studio with a double-height ceiling. But before the property hit the market, the previous owner had opted to build a larger pottery studio a stone’s throw away from the home.

It made the original pottery studio redundant—and it gave Berg and his team an opportunity.

Since the ceiling was high enough, they proposed separating the space into two floors: a multipurpose room on the ground level, and a primary bedroom above.

They also enclosed the breezeway in thermal glass, making it more comfortable to go from one concrete mass to the other.

After puzzling the pieces together, the firm added a second-story dormer that creates enough space in the new bedroom for stretching out and looking around, with trees on either side framing the view. Sometimes, a car drives across the spit of sand that separates the salt marsh from the harbor leading out to the sound.

“It’s like a little train set off in the distance,” Dina says. “Our room is just the most beautiful place to be.”

More Before & After stories:

How a Couple Made Their 700-Square-Foot L.A. Cottage Feel Grand

Just Wait for the “Juicy” Pool Tile Covering a Bathroom in This Brooklyn Brownstone

How a Native New Zealand Tree Became the Through Line for This Woodsy Kitchen Revamp

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: John Berg, Berg Design Architecture / @bergdesignnyc

Builder/General Contractor: Germano Builders

Structural Engineer: Maresca and Associates

Civil Engineer: Maresca and Associates

Lighting Design: Berg Design Architecture

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Before & After: How a Couple Revived a Quirky Hamptons Home With Ties to the Bauhaus