FEATURES

A MONTAUK FAMILY AND THEIR CREATIVE PALS MAKE A BEAUTIFUL MESS IN A HOUSE THAT BLURS THE LINE BETWEEN WORK AND PLAY, STUDIO AND HOME.

It's early on a Saturday morning, and Raphael Mazzucco is standing in shirtsleeves and red high-top sneakers in the living room of the Montauk home he shares with his wife, Lisa, and 15-year-old son, Sascha. "Everything here is impermanent," he muses, gesturing around a sunny, double-height room overlooking Fort Pond Bay. It's not hard to see what he means. In the corner are 12 recently completed works—Raphael's massive Rauschenberg-esque creations, which he makes by applying paint or bleach or found objects to his own photography and then casting it in resin—waiting to be shipped off to the new offices of L'Oreal Paris. Across the paint-spattered hardwood floor is an old Wurlitzer that found its way into the house last night with a friend. Yesterday, more than a dozen works (18 pieces) were stacked near the entryway, but those have since been sent to fill the Southampton restaurant Nello's. The only other living-room furniture to speak of is a tarp-covered table strewn with painting supplies, a 12-foot-long sideboard the Mazzuccos picked up at The Furniture Garden in Water Mill and "prayed would fit," and, in the corner, a lounge made of concrete—a nod to permanence, perhaps, in a house where people and things are always coming and going.

The couch isn't solid concrete, but rather cement stucco, and it goes nicely with the couple's concrete-platform bed upstairs, and with the house's interior walls, which are covered with the stuff. (The master bathtub is the only solid poured slab in the house.) "We just did all the walls," Lisa explains. "When there are imperfections on drywall, it looks horrible. When you get paint on concrete, it's just concrete."

If it all sounds very spare and industrial, it's not, though Raphael jokes about the "burn" he occasionally gets from brushing up against a wall. The house is a studio and a retreat for the globe-trotting husband and his wife, also a professional photographer (she shoots classical musicians; he's best known for his Sports Illustrated swimsuit-issue covers). But despite its lack of creature comforts, the house is also a meeting place of sorts for the Mazzuccos' inner circle, artists and other East End creatives who tend to come and go at all hours of the day and night.

Most of the house was designed—or is being designed, as it's a work in progress—by the couple in collaboration with their friend Thom Fleming, a former GQ model and firefighter turned Montauk carpenter, who for years helped maintain Eothen, the old Paul Morrissey estate now owned by J.Crew's Mickey Drexler. It's Fleming's addition of wood to concrete that makes the house feel organic. In the breakfast nook, Fleming covered the walls to half-height with reclaimed barn board and from a felled 300-year-old East Hampton elm created a freeform, butterfly-jointed dining table framed by low-slung benches. In the bathrooms are Japanese-inspired touches like black pebble tiling, stone shelves and, in the downstairs bath off the kitchen, a teak soaking tub. On the doors, sculpted knobs are made from odd pieces of driftwood Fleming found while walking on the beaches in Montauk and Vancouver, and near Raphael's office, Fleming installed a window frame also made from driftwood, meant to mimic the aged wooden casings that Raph, as his wife and friends call him, uses to frame many of his works. It is Raphael's art that is the other main decorative element in the house: huge canvases in wooden frames or glass boxes are everywhere, leaning against the birch tree at the foot of the gravel driveway, hanging above a fireplace in the great room, or covering a single wall in the master bath.

The Mazzuccos moved here nearly seven years ago, after having lived in Vancouver (where Raphael was born and where the two met), Italy, Amsterdam and Manhattan. When they arrived, the house was "very '70s, very Miami Vice," says Lisa. "Pink ceilings and sliding glass doors everywhere, glass blocks that went from the ground floor up," and an exterior clad in white vertical cedar siding. The siding has since been power-washed and then stained an old-barn red, and the sliders replaced by plate-glass windows. In the backyard, a Japanese-inspired garden with terraced stones leading to the pool was loosely designed by Raphael's father, a Vancouver-based landscape architect whom Lisa describes as a "70-year-old ex-bodybuilder who's really into Japanese gardens." Like everything else in the house, however, the garden is subject to revision. Raph's dad is visiting this month, Fleming notes. "If you come back August 1, this will all be completely different."

The restless creative energy the Mazzuccos bring to their house is similar to the way Raphael approaches his art, and even they seem never to know what's coming next. "One time, a big painting ended up in the pool," Lisa says. "Sascha dove in, dragged it out, and laid it out to dry, but the paint was still wet when it went in, and it came out all distorted. Raphy took one look at it and said, 'Ah! It's perfect now.'" As for the house, a second-floor addition, a renovated guest room and new siding are all in the works. But who knows. Says Lisa, "Once it's done, it'll be time to start all over again."