T
he midafternoon quiet is pierced by the gentle
crackle of toddler chatter. “Is he up?” Jordan
Roth asks his husband, Richie Jackson, who
checks his phone. On the screen is a grainy vid-
eo of their towheaded three-year-old, Levi,
standing at the side of his crib. Jackson rises
from the living-room sofa to fetch him. It is a
bright late-summer Sunday, and the couple have
just said goodbye to 10 weekend houseguests after a heaping lunch
of chicken Milanese, calamari, and cucumber-watermelon salad.
This is not atypical; the couple love to fill their turn-of-the-century
East Hampton summer-colony cottage with as many friends as it
will hold (lucky guests have included everyone from Oprah Winfrey
to Mayor Pete Buttigieg). “The house was conceived to be full,”
says Roth, a five-time Tony Award–winning theater producer. “It’s
all about different places to sit and eat. I love the dance through a
weekend, coming together as a full group and then splintering.”
The New York couple began as regulars in East Hampton them-
selves, spending summers at the nearby home of Roth’s parents, real
estate developer Steven Roth and theater producer Daryl. When Roth
and Jackson decided it was time to find a place of their own, they
began biking through Roth’s parents’ beach-adjacent neighborhood
and down Lee Avenue—wide, stately and dappled by 150-year-old
London planes. “It was always our favorite street,” says Jackson, also
a writer-producer and the author of the recent Gay Like Me, a cele-
bration of parenting and sexual identity addressed to his son (with his
ex-partner actor B. D. Wong), Jackson, whom he and Roth co-parent.
Trouble was, historic homes tend to stay in families for generations.
But one morning a broker showed them a handsome shingled Queen
Anne Revival–style house, which he said he would be listing that
afternoon. “No, you won’t,” Roth replied—and he and Jackson had
only set foot in the foyer when they decided that it would be theirs.
They christened the house LoveLee.
“You have a sense of history here in the trees and in these original
homes, which I find so moving,” says Roth. A renovation was need-
ed—“original but better,” Roth says, explaining their approach to
the 1899 home, designed by Joseph Greenleaf Thorpe, whose more
famous summer cottage, Grey Gardens, is just down the road. “I
think that’s the art of these restorations: fixing but not taking any
of the character and charm away.”
They enlisted architect-designer duo Timothy Haynes and Kevin
Roberts, who had also designed the couple’s modern, monochromatic
West Village apartment. An overarching goal was integrating the
house with the two-acre garden. In the north-facing living room
they expanded the windows with views of the cutting garden, rose
garden, and woodland walk. The sofas, meanwhile, were covered in a
cabbage-rose Cowtan & Tout chintz. A Tony Scherman rose painting
crowns the mantel, and Carmen Almon’s tole poppies decorate the
coffee table. The window framing the central staircase was expanded
as well, so gardens could be seen from every vantage point.
Roth had discovered the work of renowned British landscape archi-
tect Arne Maynard through one of the designer’s books. “His work
has such a sense of history and story and magic,” says Roth, “exactly
what we said about the house.” Roth and Maynard created a narrative
to help shape the sensibility of the garden: The house was owned by
an Edwardian-era grande dame named Sybil, an irreverent Brit and
world traveler. “I would send notes to Jordan: ‘Just touring Italy,
came across this antique. Love, Sybil,’ ” explains Maynard puckishly.
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WHAT A WAY TO GO
A row of iron archways climbing with roses frames a crushed quartz-and-stone path.
