By Melissa Feldman | Photographs by Joe Carrotta for WSJ

In the middle of a manicured grassy lawn, juxtaposed against a classic shingle-style house in Sagaponack, a village in New York's Southampton, stands a sleek, cantilevered pink pool house that blurs the line between art and design. Completed in 2024, the structure is the latest -- and perhaps most personal -- collaboration between architect Roger Ferris and longtime client Frank Gallipoli.

Designed to accompany the 75-foot Corian-clad lap pool, the adjacent pool house came about over time. The above-ground pool itself -- installed in 2012 for $350,000 -- was an ambitious project that turned a pool into a sculptural object. "We decided collectively it would be interesting to reflect the sky with a light pink trough that happens to be a lap pool," said Ferris about the form -- and the color choice of the Corian in Strawberry Ice.

Ferris has done a number of renovation projects on homes Gallipoli has owned, including Phillip Johnson's 1952 Wiley house in New Canaan, Conn., and a townhouse on New York's Upper East Side. The men met in the mid-1990s, when Ferris was designing the Greenwich, Conn., offices and trading floor of American International Group, where Gallipoli -- a commodities broker -- was working at the time. When Gallipoli bought two neighboring homes in Sagaponack in 2010, Ferris was tapped to reorganize and renovate the smaller residence that Gallipoli lives in with his wife and five kids.

In 2021, Gallipoli parked a PanAmerica Airstream near the pool. It was an experiment in utility and aesthetics that was in direct contrast to the cottage-y style home. It didn't solve the design brief, but they enjoyed the dissonance it created with the rest of the community. Ultimately, the trailer proved too cramped and temporary, Ferris said and that's when they started talking seriously about building a pool house.

To accommodate a small footprint and adhere to zoning, Ferris created a cantilevered shape, clad in aluminum panels in a high-gloss finish named Vaguely Pink that matches the width and atmospheric rosy hue of the pool. "There's a geometry to it," Ferris said of the pool house's angled periscope-like form, which offers panoramic views of the pristine landscape from the upper floor.

The compact 1,465-square-foot, three-story building cost $1.5 million and was finished in 2024. It has sliding glass windows and doors, polished concrete and wood floors and a green roof planted with Sedum. There is a small kitchenette outfitted with Bulthaup cabinets and countertops and a pink Smeg refrigerator as well as two bathrooms with showers. "In the end, it's in the simplicity of the gesture that's compelling," Ferris said.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 13, 2025 15:30 ET (19:30 GMT)

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