At home with a stylish creative couple in the Hamptons and Brooklyn

During the worst of the pandemic, the house became a retreat for the family, who moved from Brooklyn to Springs full-time, bringing the triangle of garden, studio and home into sharp relief. In the garden, the children got involved in everything from seeding to the harvest. The raised beds offer bounty from the earliest lettuces to the final autumn chard, all for the picking only a step away from the kitchen’s screen door. Full baskets are carried inside and everything is used in that day’s dishes – tomato sauces, pies, artichokes and big green salads. ‘The kids just want to pickle everything,’ says Fitzhugh, laughing. A pot simmers on the stove many days, though it is not always food for lunch or supper. Sometimes, it is seawater that has been collected from the beach and boiled down to a slurry. This is then left in shallow pans on tables outside in the sun to evaporate, leaving its sea salt behind, which is bottled and tagged to be given to friends and family.

Picking tomatoes in the garden

Cooking as a family using homegrown produce

Dean Hearne

The studio part of the equation is a few steps further on, through the garden, where an old garage was gently winter proofed and is heated primarily by a small cast-iron stove that Fitzhugh grew up with in New Hampshire. Here, he develops ideas. There are maquettes for his more monumental works – the large-scale metal or wood sculptures now in private collections and public spaces, including in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and under the Brooklyn Bridge – and smaller, more intimate reliefs made of clay tile, which are hung narratively in groupings.

The vocabulary and shape of Fitzhugh’s work captures a childhood spent under an open sky among the mountains of New England and rock steps climbed on hikes with his parents – steps that fellow hikers would fashion, leaving them for those that followed. ‘I’ve always been interested in the silhouettes of landscapes. As a kid, I’d imagine myself in miniature inside the landscapes I was drawing,’ he says. ‘I think this is why I like to begin by working on a small scale, creating a maquette – and why I encourage folks to climb or crawl through many of my larger works.’

Fitzhugh laying out a series of tiles for a wall hanging based on Norse mythology

Dean Hearne

A single clay tile made by Fitzhugh

Dean Hearne

The children work with clay, too, making ‘tiles’ – slices they manipulate that are then glazed and hung on the wall as a record of their handiwork. The couple might meet in the studio if they are discussing an installation of Fitzhugh’s art or planning the fabrication of a sculptural design – a handrail, chimneypiece or light fixture for a project. Often Lyndsay works on the first floor of the house, in a sunlit space with a clear view out to Lucy, anchored in the bay. Responsible for the look and feel of the interiors of The Brooklyn Home Company’s properties, Lyndsay’s love of a calm palette is a hallmark of her work. ‘It’s not that it all has to be white,’ she says. ‘I like pale colours because they let textures show much more clearly and I want the background to be unfussy, so other materials or art can come through. In our house here, Fitzhugh’s work, which is over and near the fireplace, says something very different from the pale floors, walls and upholstery. So does the antique round library table – which also happens to make an excellent roundabout for the kids. I like this interplay.’

Across the lane is Papa Joe, a neighbour with a backhoe digger. In late 2021, space was made using this digger for the carving of 20 enormous tree trunks from a local tree service. They had been felled due to a beetle blight in the bark, but were fine for what Fitzhugh wanted to do, which was to create large-scale totemic carvings. ‘When they were finished, I titled the series Friendship to reflect the friendship with Papa Joe and my kinship with the trees, I suppose. It just felt natural,’ Fitzhugh explains.

A weathered sculpture stands close by the greenhouse

Dean Hearne

Charlotte and friends climb on his Recess: Tap & Pointe sculpture

Dean Hearne

Friendship spent last summer at LongHouse Reserve, a 16-acre estate and sculpture garden in East Hampton, New York, as part of its Art in the Gardens programme. ‘Instead of being sent to the chipper, they were returned to a place less than a mile from where the trees spent many decades growing,’ he says with satisfaction.

A day at the house in Springs might end with supper on board Lucy with friends, and a jump off the bow to swim. ‘She isn’t a fast boat,’ says Fitzhugh. ‘But when we are out on her going for a little jaunt round Gardiners Bay, we look back at the house as the light is fading. We can see our triangle and we can feel the rhythm of our family pursuits and what we are, each day, hoping to create.’