Scents & Sensibility

Tasked with designing a waterfront home for famed perfumer Frédéric Malle, AD100 Hall of Famers Annabelle Selldorf and Louis Benech balance romance and rigor

- SAM COCHRAN

At the Hampton Bays home of Frédéric and Marie Malle, the water looms large, if deceptively so. Beyond swaths of wild grasses and shrubs, the East End’s famously wide sky meets the Great Peconic’s deep-blue depths in a postcard-perfect horizon line. But meander toward it and you'll find there’s a ways to go yet, that verdant expanse concealing the steep sandy bluff and the many flights of stairs you must descend to reach the gentle tides—what is now, for the couple, a cherished act of delayed gratification.

LEFT MARIE AND FRÉDÉRIC MALLE WITH AN ANTIQUE VENETIAN BENCH AND ARTWORK BY CLAUDE VIALLAT. OPPOSITE A GENTLY CURVING BANISTER DISTINGUISHES THE CENTRAL STAIR HALL, WHICH DISPLAYS A SCULPTURE BY JEAN-LUC MOULÈNE AND, ON THE REAR WALL, ARTWORKS BY FRANÇOIS MORELLET AND JEAN DEGOTTEX.

“It was always my dream to have a place on a beach,” says Frédéric, the legendary French perfumer. Oceanfront living, of course, comes at a cost, not least of all psychologically in the face of climate change. “There’s the threat of those waves,” he reflects. “A bad winter day can erase your house. But being on a bay is a happy medium.” And so it was that he and Marie, a psychoanalyst, set their sights on this low-key community along the westernmost stretch of the South Fork, less than two hours by car from New York City. Here the couple bought a narrow but deep plot abutting the shore on which to realize another long-held wish: to build a home from scratch for themselves and their four children.