With our Book Club series, we hand over the proverbial mic to our Experts—letting them share their work, their thought process, and their best tips, all in their own words. The following is an excerpt from Workstead’s Interiors of Belonging, published this month with Rizzoli.

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Canoe Place has operated in Hampton Bays, New York, since the 17th century.

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The love for the landmark runs as deep as its history. Indeed, back in July 1921, when an overnight fire rendered Canoe Place unsalvageable, then-owner Julius Keller told reporters he would rebuild “as soon as the embers are cold.” The following year, Keller opened an enlarged hotel designed by architect William Lawrence Bottomley that Architectural Record described as “an accurate and sympathetic interpretation to such a work of reproduction.” Luminaries ranging from Lucille Ball to Albert Einstein to John D. Rockefeller traveled to the 40-room property for the next two and a half decades.

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Tapped by Rechler Equity Partners to help relaunch the hospitality destination as Canoe Place and Cottages in 2022, Workstead looked to Bottomley’s adaptation as its primary design precedent. While feeling wholly original, the completed interiors capture the resort’s heyday between 1922 and the late 1940s.

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In 20 guest rooms, five cottages, and multiple public spaces, Workstead balanced reverence for history with a vision of a garden by the sea. The main building’s publicly accessible ground floor is divided into four zones, and the design team amplified the connection between indoors and landscape by pulling herringbone-brick exterior paths through the lobby to the library. The lobby also features a trellised ceiling, as a continuation of the trellis lining Canoe Place’s front walkway. A trellis surrounds the freestanding outdoor bar of Good Ground Tavern, and botanical and trellis-patterned wallpapers clad the main building’s guest rooms.

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The gardens and coastal environments of the Hamptons further informed Workstead’s color palettes. Chalky-blue wall and ceiling panels ensconce the 34-seat Bottle Room, where a central table and tiled surfaces convey the informality of outdoor dining. In the adjoining dining room, which seats 56, a meadow-like carpet replaces herringbone flooring; the interior is bathed in sand tones. The tavern’s indoor and outdoor bars are both coated in a signature green to evoke a shaded garden spot. Pale blues appear in guest spaces.

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Whereas Bottomley’s interiors employed brightly colored and floral-patterned textiles to feel relevant to their moment, Workstead’s scheme confects Gustavian, nautical, and Wiener Werkstätte design vocabularies to undeniably contemporary impact. Accents like an angular reception desk and anthropomorphic bed frames underscore this point of view; artworks by Doug Aitken and Tony Tasset provide additional, fantastical accents that compel visitors to pause for a laugh or a moment of self-reflection.

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Yet a familiar domesticity lends cohesion to diverse vignettes and eclectic compositions throughout the resort, as well. Shelves displaying china line the Bottle Room, while the library centers on a wood-burning fireplace; cozy seating near windows encourages lounging or soft conversation. The overall spirit is one of accessible luxury, in which the campus is perceived equally as a place for escape and a template for everyday living.

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Buy Interiors of Belonging and shop the Workstead collection to make a lasting impact in your own home.

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