Turn What You Love Into Where You Live

Iconic Modern Home Creates A Family Surf Lodge In Montauk

BY NINA THOMSON

Art work, table lamps, beachy accessories, towels, bed linens, flatware, glassware, pots and pans. These are a few of the things with which the design and staging firm Iconic Modern Home has equipped houses they’ve been asked to decorate. “We draw the line at toilet paper, but everything else we can handle!” says Geoffrey Walsky, who runs the firm with his business partner, Teresa Kratzman.

The pair, who have an outpost in Water Mill, specialize in the design of turn-key homes and luxury rentals, property staging, and renovations. In addition to eastern Long Island, they work in New York, Chicago, Greenwich, Connecticut, and Palm Beach, Florida. Walsky, the firm’s creative director, deals with design. He’s got a passion for mid-century furniture, though increasingly he finds himself commissioning contemporary pieces. Kratzman handles logistics and just about everything else. Both have backgrounds in finance and it shows; they speak easily of “deliverables,” “end products” and “interactive relationships.”

Interactivity-wise, Kratzman says, “We spend a lot of time really getting to know our clients. It’s important to us to get a feel for who they are.” To this end, the two ask the home’s future occupants questions such as ‘What makes you happy?’ ‘What do you dream about?’ According to Walsky, the East Enders who come to them like to focus on the fun stuff, as the property in question is often a second or third home. For such clients, comfort is everything. Kratzman notes, “We always say, It’s not about us. We design for the way our clients live.” Walsky adds, “In some cases, we’ll even trade aesthetics for comfort.”

Most of their interiors, however, endeavor to be a successful marriage of aesthetics and comfort. Case in point: the six bedroom, 5,500-square-foot new-build beach compound in Montauk that Walsky decorated and furnished. The client, Rich Perello, is a local property developer who had previously used Iconic Modern Home on staging projects. Having seen what the team could do, he brought them in while the project was still in the planning stages, thereby allowing Walsky to offer informed opinion when asked.

The property is within walking distance of Ditch Plains. It comprises a main house and an ancillary structure that serves as a rec room, office, and guest quarters. According to Walsky, his brief was to transform it into “a modern surf lodge with a fun vibe in a luxe polished way” for Perello and his family of avid surfers. “They’re all really into the outdoors,” Walsky explains, “and we knew it was going to be a house that would get a lot of use.”

“At one of our first meetings with the client,” recalls Kratzman, “he told us, ‘This can’t be a ‘Don’t Touch’ house.’” With that in mind, Walsky went on to create a series of multi-textured interiors that are the opposite of ‘Hands Off.’ To the contrary, the ‘Please Touch’ quotient throughout the house is a high one. There’s a low-slung upholstered sectional, natural fiber throws, a nubby rug in neutral tones, and lots of warm wood in the open-plan living, dining, and cooking space.

And then there is Walsky’s choice of textural furniture, from the sculptural handmade birch lanterns over the kitchen island by Finnish design team Secto Lighting and Ethnicraft oak counter stools to the ten-foot-long oak dining table of Walsky’s own design. The decorating scheme works in concert with the structure’s architecture, playing up its high vaulted ceilings, oak details, and expanses of floor-to-ceiling windows glass sliders (which gives on a stone patio — the same stone as the one that paves the floors in the entrance hall).

Walsky’s achievement is to have furnished the space with contemporary pieces that look neither rustic nor mass produced. Clients often profess to love mid-century style, he says, but sometimes they get cold feet and request furniture that is brand new. On the other hand, they don’t want ‘same old.’ Walsky’s solution to vintage ambivalence is to focus on custom pieces. They look fantastic — and anyway, at the end of a long day surfing the waves, comfort rules.