Babes In Toyland.(beach house design and furnishing)

Byline: Eve MacSweeney. Photographed by FranAs.ois Halard.

Adam Lindemann and Amalia Dayan turned a Montauk spec house into a playfully sophisticated beach retreat.

I never wanted a house in the Hamptons," says Amalia Dayan, who spent the past few summers on a boat moored in Sag Harbor, in which she and her husband, Adam Lindemann, cruised around Long Island's East End. But when she became pregnant with their daughter, Zohar, born last February, "the nesting thing kicked in." On a visit to a pony farm with Frances, Adam's horse-mad eleven-year-old, she discovered Montauk for the first time. "It was so wild and different," says Amalia, who grew up in Israel. "I didn't feel like an outsider there."

That night, the couple began house-hunting on the Internet. She is an art dealer, he a collector and author (his first volume, Collecting Contemporary, from Taschen, will soon be followed by Collecting Design ), and as a pair Lindemann and Dayan are known for their adventurous taste and patronage in the fields of contemporary art, architecture, and furniture design. In a home they own near Woodstock, New York, where the couple celebrated their marriage in 2006, Lindemann essentially handed over the house to the artist Richard Woods, whose interventions transformed it inside and out. In Manhattan, they have been working for several years with the Tanzanian-born, London-based architect David Adjaye to reimagine an Upper East Side town house as a radically modern construction, "pushing the envelope to challenge the landmark rules," says Adam. In Montauk, their ideal would have been to build a new house, but there was no land available to fit their desire to be oceanside on the bluff.

Eventually they settled for a just-finished contractors' spec house on a double lot, whose biggest selling point, says Amalia, "was a TV inside a shaving mirror in one of the bathrooms." "It was built to sell to some hedge-fund guy, with a billiard room and a wine cellar and a screening room, all things we would never have," adds Adam. "If we have a bottle of wine, we drink it. We were basically buying the bones and the permit and the dirt."

They hired Miranda Brooks to landscape the exterior, briefing her to hide the house behind a screen of foliage and to create gardens that looked as if they had been there forever. And then, in a characteristically bold gesture, they invited Adjaye, known for his urban architecture as well as his collaborations with artists, to reinvent the house. "When Amalia suggested it, I thought, What an unusual idea," says Adam approvingly, "because he'll end up changing this in some unexpected, unknown way and it'll be an experience."

Brooks and Adjaye were put on a tight deadlinejust six months to finish the project before last Memorial Dayand had many challenges to contend with. Brooks added mystery to the house's approach by laying a new, meandering, track-like driveway and planting a large green "room" hedged in privet to function as a virtual vestibule, complete with a Jonathan Meese sculpture set off-center, through which guests enter the front door. This new space, together with a system of pathways and flower-beds, helped to resolve the awkward geometry of the pool, which was built at a diagonal angle to the house. Brooks surrounded it with an amorphous, rolling box hedge to conceal it from the rest of the garden.