At first, the prospect of outfitting and inhabiting a home composed entirely of hexagonal rooms seemed, well, daunting. But that was the challenge that powerhouse architect Lauren Rottet assumed when she purchased an idiosyncratic house in Montauk, New York, designed by the legendary modernist maestro George Nelson and his partner Gordon Chadwick. “Most designers are taught to think in right angles and rectangles,” says Rottet, the principal of Houston-based Rottet Studio, an international architecture and interior design firm with branches in New York and Los Angeles. “But after I divorced myself from that traditional academic thinking, I discovered the hexagon is really an amenable shape in design. What first seemed totally restricting ended up being completely liberating,” she adds.
Rottet’s path to domestic bliss on the easternmost end of Long Island took a circuitous route. For years, California had been the focus of the architect’s search for a second home far removed from the blistering heat of summer in Texas. Then a fortuitous outing to a colleague’s home in the Hamptons—a place she had never visited, despite her extensive travels—shifted Rottet’s sights to the East Coast. “I was a little bored, so I decided to do some real estate snooping. I saw a listing for a George Nelson house in Montauk, which obviously caught my attention, and I arranged to see the house. Long story short, I fell in love with the place and bought it,” she recalls.
