The Restoration
The issue after buying the property, Mitchell explains, was “how do you take a house that has no ‘good bones’ and restore it to being a great house?”

The couple knew what they didn’t want. “Out here you see a lot of ground-up McShingles,” Guzmán says. “We call them ‘window catalogues,’ ” Mitchell adds. “It looks like they couldn’t decide what windows to use, so the entire thing has 19 different styles.”

Their solution, Guzmán says, was to “take our inspiration from the original exterior,” which was designed in the “cottage” style. “We added on a wing, and we said we want to make it bigger, but make it seem like it was expanded organically” over time, she explains.

To expand the house, though, they had to move it. So the entire cottage was lifted up and moved to the side; a full foundation was dug; and the house was laid out in a way that felt rambling without being overwhelmingly large.

“I think we’re pretty geeky students of the great architects of the time,” says Mitchell. “If you look at those houses, you realize you’re re-creating a little bit of quirk and mishmash: A few windows are tucked in and deviate from the others. Because if you don’t have enough idiosyncrasy the house looks like it was built recently, and if you have too much of it the house just looks weird.”

They didn’t start completely from scratch, though. Along with the existing structure, they unearthed, as they did the gut renovation, 30-foot-long pieces of timber that had been used as vertical supports; those were subsequently used as room ties and ceiling details.

The House
The final product, while definitely not cottage-size, does indeed look like a rambling early 20th century weekend home, at least on the outside. The inside, though, is distinctly contemporary.

“We didn’t want something that felt traditionally ‘Hamptons,’ ” Mitchell says. Instead, the interior is “a nod to something that felt a little cleaner and a little more contemporary.”

The main floor has an open kitchen and family room, separate living and dining rooms, a study, guest suite, and covered porch. The second floor has six en-suite bedrooms, the third floor has two more along with an open landing, and in the basement there’s yet another en-suite guest bedroom, a game room, spa, home theater, and a climate-controlled wine room.

“When you’re building a lower level you have the ability to put in a wish list” of amenities, says Mitchell. “It turned out, fortuitously, that when people wanted to shelter, we were planning a lot of amenities that you could have on an estate that you don’t want to leave.”