Thomas OBrien - Thomas OBrien: Library House

For Dan

Te enim vidi somnium. Semper te amo.

The walled garden at dawn, looking back toward the library room.

In so much of what I do, Im inspired to make old things new again. Or, more specifically, to make new things that feel as though they come from some other, older time, things with an echoing sense of familiarity. Ive always been one for whom history and stories matter, and I like to put history to use. Im interested in homes and the objects in them that are designed to work for the present; they come from somewhere elegant and true, yet they take you somewhere unexpected and new. This isnt nostalgia as much as it is a grounding in the really perfect design qualities of so many useful things, tempered and refined over generations, that we can reinterpret, reinvent, or elaborate on, but which we can never quite let go of. To me, this is the definition of whats classic.

And beyond traditional or modern, thats my aim in everything I create, certainly in my interiors, and on special occasions, in the crafting of a house in every detail from the ground up: to capture time and bend it to the present.

This is how I began with the project that my husband, Dan, and I have come to call the Library House: a guesthouse and design studio situated in a series of gardens, next door to our home on Long Island known as the Academy. It started with the dream of a garden, then expanded to the dream of a house. I had the good fortune to build both, cultivated from the ground up, over about six years. Now its a place where we recharge, create, and workwhere we can invite clients and colleagues, families and friends to visit and see a way of living. Its an elegant, warm home for entertaining, equipped in the way that fine family houses were built for gatherings long ago. The furnishings and decoration are abundanthappily layered, garden-infused, handmade, and determinedly pretty, a natural antidote to the twenty-first-century diet of technology and aesthetic spareness. There is a central kitchen for both formal and informal dining that draws on wonderful old kitchen traditions. It is also set up like a modern loftfor the lunches and dinners and cooking together that are a core part of each day, happening right in the midst of this very large, artistic room, the library. And of course, this is a place where we spend as much time outdoors as we do indoors.

This book is the story of imagining that house, and ultimately, how we now enjoy living here. Its about giving form to favorite ideas that Id been thinking about for many years, from the outside inthe revival of a more formal architectural character that is getting ever harder to preserve and build today (the mouldings, millwork, cabinetry; the detail of the faades; the many stairways and fireplaces; the opportunity to create a set of most special bathrooms and an inventive kitchen). In fact, the design and construction of both the house and the gardens have everything to do with learning and time, with preserving craft, and with adding to history rather than discarding it. The whole home is an echo of the past; the experience of an eccentric, charming, rambling, generational, hand-built old home, translated into the brand-new invention that it is, all from the time of now.

And from the inside outrooms designed and fitted around cherished pieces of furniture and favorite routines, the older and practical rhythms of caretaking at home that Ive always loved. The keeping rooms and cabinets holding all kinds of housewares, linens, silver, dishes, glass and crystal; the fact of a full library, in and of itself. Collections of art, objects, and treasures, the meaningful finds and furniture that Dan and I discovered in our travels. Ever-present flowers, rich patterns and colors, signaling life and joy. The studio and storehouse of many of the products that Ive designed, and all kinds of antique ingredients that inspire new ones. Books and objects at the ready to inform, as we design new projects and think on ideas to come.

Like anyone assembling and saving things over time for their ideal home, I gathered my own constellation of all these things over decades. Putting together a collection is not an overnight endeavor. It is a personal history. One begins to see themes and variations and adds to the collection so that there are groupings and stories. Yet in my life as a designer, much of this history had no place to settle for many, many years. Parts and pieces had been sequestered in storage spaces and relegated to temporary perches in my homes and at my company, Aero, in New York, quietly waiting.

Much like a garden, really, the house grew up and around these special things as much as they grew into it.

And so the whole project is truly alive, assimilated and added to as new things are discovered. We are surrounded by the touchstones that we look to all the time in the work we do and the way we live. And they become new things, because we use them now. All have finally found their home here.

From the time I was a small boy, Ive been interested in peoples homes. I always wanted to ask about furniture and art, or anything that was an heirloom. I think this is because Im naturally curious about how such things reflect the reality and the interests of the people who live there, their particular history. Im always drawn to the details, how things were made, how they age and last, how they show the hand and the creativity of some talented person in designs both fine and simple. That creativity, fine and simple, is for me the best and most authentic outcome of any design processthe individual choices; the practical needs that anchor a place or an object in real life; and the lens of other favorite houses, gardens, styles, arts, that all reveal what someones dreams are.

These are the houses Ive always most admired, from any period. They make the old into something new. They make the new feel that its always been there. They make something classic that will last.

I wanted to build a place like that, where everything is personal, everything has a story, everything is to be used and appreciated and no detail is spared. So, Id like to invite you to take a walk through the Library with me. And if the house looks like its always been here, well, thats the magic that Im always working toward. Thats what I most wish to make for people. To create something thats real and magical at the same time. And the trick of that turns out to be everything.

The front of the house was designed with windows paired and positioned in various ways, with a setback wing, which one sees in many early New England homes. All of the shutters, the front door, and the fanlight are painted in classic Litchfield Green, a favorite, darkest, not-quite-black green that I love for its crisp, graphic, and authentic feeling.