THE WAY THE LIGHT HITS

In East Hampton, Julie Hillman creates a four-season house for her family that plays with sun and shadow—and finds her calling as an interior designer in the process.

- MARISA MELTZER

IT was in 1996, years before Julie Hillman opened her own design studio, that her career began. She was on maternity leave from her job in fashion, and she and her husband were searching for a home in the Hamptons. “We couldn’t find anything, and our realtor was fed up and said, ‘You should buy a piece of land and build a house. You’re wasting my time,’ ” Hillman recalls.

It took some hunting, but they found a plot in the woody northwestern end of East Hampton with a long entry and a lot of quiet. It is the Hamptons not of sea views and certainly not of parties, but of solitude. The decor had to reflect that—no obvious beachy references, but rather somewhere that could feel at once elegant and familiar.

Hillman proceeded to get hands-on in the design process to a granular extent. She mulled over “every window, every door,” she says with a laugh. “I didn’t realize it, but here was my new career that included my love for design and my love for collecting.” She went on to found her own interior design firm, in New York City in 2002, and has since decorated homes for high-profile clients in New York, Aspen, Palm Beach, and the Hamptons. But this house was where so many of her design signatures began: liberal use of white, plays on proportion, a mix of ultramodern and one-of-a-kind flea market pieces.