Written by Mitchell Owens • Styled by Carlos Mota • Photographed by Roger Davies
Talk long enough with Scott Currie, and it becomes clear that if he wasn’t already perfectly satisfied promoting the understated elegance of the Elie Tahari fashion label, he might be serving with distinction in the merchant marine. The clean-cut public-relations executive is passionate about everything nautical—sailors’ knots, signal flags, vintage ship fittings. “As a kid I collected buoys too,” says the Manhattan-based Currie, who spent his childhood summers navigating the coves of New York’s storied Shelter Island (his grandfather was the rocky speck’s only doctor). All of this goes a long way to explaining the salty theme that has emerged in Currie’s house in the village of Southampton, New York. From the library’s tidy brass map lights that were once used on a yacht to menacing sawfish bills in the entry, the weekend crash pad is a lively salute to the life aquatic.
Eight years ago, however, the late-Victorian home Currie bought was nothing of the sort. It was encased in metal shingles, plywood paneling and linoleum covered the walls and floors, and drop ceilings made the small rooms seem even more cramped. Still, the three-story building was structurally sound, and the fenced property, measuring a little less than a half acre, felt like a compound, thanks to a tiny guest cottage and a spacious garage clustered close to the house. The street was quiet and shady and only a couple of blocks from the Southampton train station, meaning weekend excursions would be a breeze for Currie and his guests. Nearly best of all, as far as the lifelong sailor was concerned, was the history of the place—it was built around 1899 for a ship’s captain.
Currie’s stem-to-stern renovation turned out to be a four-year project that included moving the three-room guest cottage to the rear of the narrow rectangular lot to give host and hosted more privacy and to create space for a pool. He then transformed the garage into a poolhouse with a cupola and columned porch (the main house got one of those too). As the metal shingles fell, weathered cedar shakes emerged, and after the wall-to-wall carpeting and marbleized linoleum were peeled away, the yellow-pine floors were restored to a golden gleam. An interior door, discovered behind a section of plywood, was reinstated to improve traffic flow, and a couple of new windows were installed in the master bedroom upstairs to provide more light. The entrance hall’s beadboard dado turned out to be too beaten up to preserve, so Currie replaced it with horizontal pine planks finished with a gracefully honed edge and painted dove-gray. More Colonial than Victorian, the plain-board construction gives the space a resonant sense of history that prepares visitors for the subtle and evocative millwork and salvaged 18th-century beams incorporated throughout the buildings.
“I had a fantasy about creating the kind of home a ship’s captain would have lived in after years spent exploring the world,” Currie says. In fact, an antique Belgian portrait of a bearded mariner hangs in the library like a presiding spirit. From the look of things, though, Currie’s house is a reflection not of a typical sailor but of the kind of seafarer he might have been—thoughtfully acquisitive, gifted with a fine color sense, and a dab hand at do-it-yourself projects. “I’m really proud of that,” he says, pointing to the grouping of lacy fan and branch corals he picturesquely assembled in a glass display case in the library. The bell jars carefully stacked full of birds’ eggs (similar ones can be ordered from thefeatheredegg.com) are his handiwork too. “It’s like having a lifetime of expeditions around,” he explains of his collections. “I love that naturalist ambience.”
Against largely restrained backgrounds—most walls are painted sea-mist grays or foggy shades of white, though one guest room glows the luscious pink of the inside of a conch shell—Currie has amassed an array of era-spanning spoils evocative of treasures disgorged from the hold of a ship after a long voyage to exotic ports. Chinese Chippendale–style chairs painted lemongrass-yellow join a handsome ebonized chest of drawers that looks vaguely Spanish (it’s actually vintage Dorothy Draper). A lamp made of a massive glass bottle glows beneath an elegant mirror framed by braided rope. Here a landscape painting is propped on an easel; there a tortoise shell stands on a windowsill alongside old green bottles. In the pink bedroom is a red-lacquer trunk once used to transport porcelain from the Orient to the Occident. Instead of a conventional handrail, a length of hefty twisted hemp rises with the staircase to the third-floor loft, once an unfinished attic.
Rope is something of a leitmotif, from a rope-wrapped lantern picked up at the Clignancourt flea market in Paris and now illuminating the pantry (home to vintage Wedgwood plates depicting American sailing ships) to a wall clock framed in the material in the poolhouse. When it’s pointed out that a psychoanalyst might have a field day with the obsession, which dates back to childhood, Currie smiles as he shrugs: “What can I say? I know a lot about knots.”
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