Free Spirits

Lee Skolnick | North Haven

At first glance it calls to mind a kid's ragtag version of the ideal playhouse. The collage of grown-up Playskool blocks -- rods, squares, rectangles, tanks -- is patched together with whatever building stuff was lying around: sheets of copper, plywood, brick, stone, cedar boards. But the waterfront vacation house Lee Skolnick built for his family in North Haven is actually a sophisticated expression of this nonconformist New York architect's design philosophy, which sidesteps traditional formulas and celebrates the versatility of common materials. Skolnick's house is like a sampler of architectural shapes, some right out of a textbook -- overhangs, vaulted rooflines and columns. Others are more original, like the dining room, an appendage that suggests the prow of a boat, a deliberate device aimed at relating the house to the water.

Vassia Kiaulenas | Farmingville

Architect Vassia Kiaulenas designed this towering structure in 1956 as a museum of sorts to showcase the paintings of her late husband, Petras. But the process of getting it built turned out to have as many twists and turns as its complex design. After a series of setbacks, including the death of the only builder she could find who respected her plan after just the massive frame had been erected, Kiaulenas and her then-teenage daughter, Laura - today also an architect and engineer - took over the construction themselves. Working mostly weekends for 10 years, despite serious accidents and vandalism, the women became carpenters, glaziers, plumbers and cabinetmakers, even excavating the small swimming pool by hand. The finished residence did not go unnoticed. Architectural Record called it ``a dilemma.'' House Beautiful described it as ``elemental and powerful.'' The Long Island chapter of the American Institute of Architects labeled it ``a remarkable, neo-Expressionist residence.'' But for Kiaulenas, the payback came the day she hung her husband's paintings throughout the multilevel house. ``He would have loved to work and create, that is, to live, as I do, in this house.''

Bran Ferren | East Hampton

Bran Ferren may have designed the friendliest house on Long Island, but its grinning face only hints at what's inside: 9,000 square feet of amusement park chic that pits Rube Goldberg gadgetry against space-age technology. Not to mention a thousand-square-foot dream kitchen to die for. Its jovial facade -- glazed panels in the shape of eyes and smiley lips -- was the brainstorm of an Oscar-winning wizard of special effects: Ferren has designed man-eating plants and robots for films, light shows for rock concerts and radiation-screening coatings for sunglasses. So it's no surprise that the unique house he describes as ``Palladian bizarre'' is home to a trio of giraffes that gazes at the moon (actually eight-foot wood sculptures set in front of a huge round window) and a life-size carved palace guard stationed in the keyhole-shaped portal of the master bedroom suite. Ferren and his creative team built the shingle-clad house on its steel skeleton in a wooded East Hampton setting in about 1987, a house, as one observer put it, ``that's a total expression of its owner.''

Norman Jaffe | Old Westbury

The late architect Norman Jaffe once referred to himself as a romantic, but that might raise a few eyebrows among those who've seen his pragmatic, back-to-basics side. Each of his houses -- and there are many all over Long Island -- is unique. Each would begin with the rise and fall of the site, the structure coaxed to follow its contours, the exteriors sculpted to blend with the existing landscape. Perhaps that connection with nature can be considered a form of romanticism. This Old Westbury house from the late 1980s, suggestive of a winged creature about to spring from a craggy perch, is an example of Jaffe's elegant rusticity, its stylized silhouette flowing from the earth in massive waves of the stone and natural wood he revered. The interplay of these materials, their colors and textures contrasted against canted planes of glass, is repeated throughout the interior. In a Jaffe house, nature doesn't stop at the threshold.

Marcel Breuer | Lawrence

The late, legendary architect Marcel Breuer built this concrete Arch House more than 30 years ago on the fringes of a marshy plain in Lawrence. A 1972 Breuer retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art trumpeted the architect's mastery of poured concrete as a building medium; even the vast sheltering arch that forms the roof is concrete. Commissioned by a retired couple who were quite comfortable in its large living space and three tiny bedrooms, the house was eventually purchased by a young family so enamored of its awesome presence they downplayed its limited size. But the ink was barely dry on the closing contract when the awful truth hit home: The house was too small for a family. Reluctant to desecrate what some call a museum piece, they turned to Manhattan architect Richard Bienenfeld, who built a low-profile addition containing an informal living area and servant's quarters over basement level exercise and utility rooms. Leaving intact every possible original inch, the addition barely brushes the left tip of the arch with a connecting passageway. Constructed with the same poured concrete and stone floors as the original, the addition blends in so well there is little to distinguish ``the new part'' from ``the old part.'' Marcel Breuer, the owners feel, would approve.

Kyle Ruhs | Westhampton

When Brian and Nanette Breyer's beach house was blown away in a nor'easter five years ago, they wanted its replacement to ``look something like a lighthouse.'' And that it does -- squatter and wider, perhaps, but also roomier and more accessible. And, according to its designer-builder, Kyle Ruhs, of Hampton Bays, its octagonal shape makes it ideal for its site in the oceanfront community of West Hampton Dunes. Using a computer, Ruhs designed an eight-sided home he says has more structural strength and captures more views than its conventional, square-sided counterparts. Set on a piling foundation 10 feet above the surface of the shifting sands, the house is designed to ride safely over future storms.

Andrew Geller | Westhampton Beach

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, even receptive, adventurous clients did double takes when Northport architect Andrew Geller unveiled his proposals for their new houses. Were the odd-looking, wood-and-glass whimsies architecture or witty, oversized toys? Animals? Spaceships? Brashly defiant of conventional images and aptly tagged with such nicknames as The Grasshopper, Butterfly, Kitten or Box Kite, Geller houses were playful yet functional, unique yet affordable. Back then they went for about $12,000; today, 10 or even 20 times that amount, especially if the small houses have been expanded. Some have been remodeled beyond recognition, some torn down. But if anyone dares to tinker with a Geller house, best not to let him know. When the architect saw that two wings had been added to this still recognizable early 1950s Box Kite house in Westhampton Beach, he says, ``it broke my heart. I intended it to look airy and free, like it had just touched down Now the effect is gone.'' Jonathan Pearlroth, who inherited the house four years ago, says that his father commissioned the house and his family had used it for years. ``It was a lot of fun, everything on different levels, even the fixtures in the bathroom. But we needed more room. When my father showed Andy what he'd done with the house, he never spoke to him again.''

Mihai Popa | Bridgehampton

For architect, sculptor and philosopher Mihai Popa, ``the nightmare of sameness'' does not apply. With a chain saw, he whacked off the square corners of ``noble old beams'' from a demolished church and rearranged them as the skeleton for this elliptical Bridgehampton house he calls The Ark. Completed in 1987, the two-story Ark's bulging walls are fitted with roomettes for sleeping and storage. Encrusted with Popa's abstract bas reliefs of animal forms, the otherworldly interior shell is an art piece reminiscent of ancient cave drawings. Built on the foundation of an 800-square-foot farm shack, the 3,000-square-foot home reflects Popa's philosophy that ``straight lines and angles are human inventions that seem at odds with nature.''

Ulrich Franzen | Georgica Pond

Is it art or architecture, a small private museum or a home? The lines of demarcation blur in this exquisitely crafted East End residence built with cast stone blocks designed by its Manhattan architect, Ulrich Franzen. Outfitted with such pedigreed components as etched glass doors inspired by the late French master Jean Dubeffet - an acquaintance of its art collector owner - and marble-and-granite flooring, the 1985 structure certainly has the stature to stand alone as an art piece. In the manner of 16th-Century Italian architects, Franzen positioned the temple-like house as if it was a rare sculpture atop an acre-size pedestal that was raised five feet above the marshy terrain of the waterside site. A vaulted roof of transparent, inch-thick industrial glass hovers more than two stories above an atrium-living area that begins at the front entry and continues to the rear pool terrace. The atrium sweeps across the diagonal axis of the square-shaped structure, splitting it into two pushed-apart triangles. Even a pair of mature trees sunk into deep wells inside the entry and the sound of water playing in the pool fountain take a back seat to the ordered geometry of this unique work of architecture-as-art.