The late-19th-century structure in Bellport, New York, has been in his family’s possession for that long, serving as a canvas for Thomas’s evolution from a child with a yard-sale business to a New York-based interior designer. Thomas still sleeps in his childhood bedroom when he returns to the property. His parents, siblings, nieces, and friends gather there regularly, using the four-bedroom house that includes two porches, a sunny sitting room, and a living room anchored by a large fireplace.
A Family Democracy
Thomas’s Manhattan apartment is white and contemporary, filled with Latin American art. Bellport called for something different: an American cottage by the sea. He describes his approach as a democracy rather than a dictatorship. “It’s a democracy,” he says. “It’s not a dictatorship.” Getting there has involved decades of experimentation, a few unlikely purchases, and regular consultation with a formidable client committee: his family. The dining room has gone from lacquered hunter green to red to its current painted pattern, where undulating lines surround a large, exuberantly colored painting. Elsewhere, Thomas used stencils to give walls the irregularity he seeks out in handmade things.
“Having something painted onto the walls gives the room soul,” he says. “There is perfection in imperfection.” The collections have accumulated on similar terms. Antique tools, gathered with his father over decades, line a hallway in carefully ordered arrangements. Thomas admires them as objects made by hand to facilitate other handmade things. Displayed together, their worn wooden forms are sculptural. In the powder room, a coal-mining cart found a second career as a basin, paired with a vintage mirror frame fitted with glass cut to accommodate the plumbing. “You’d be surprised what I’ll put in the back of my car,” he says.
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Objects From Afar
Other pieces traveled even farther. A campy painting of dogs playing poker came with his mother’s family from Yugoslavia to northern Chile, then to Santiago. After his grandmother died, the family agreed it belonged in Bellport, where it hangs in Thomas’s studio. Even the garden has benefited from his instinct to collect. Thomas acquired Chilean sculptures, including a Corten-steel piece inspired by wind-gnarled trees. For the latest overhaul, he collaborated with John Beitel of Landspace Inc., who has tended the gardens for 35 years.
They shaped a garden where formal beds give way to looser planting along paths that frame views of the water, with red dogwood branches providing color through winter. The South Shore village has long been a mecca for creatives. The South Bay Art Association held its first official meeting at the village’s community center in 1957. Thomas, who has been coming to Bellport since he was four, remembers spending time in that same building as a child. In 2019, he led the renovation of its basement bowling alley and recreation space through the Bellport Village Program Fund.
Seasonal Living
For the porch fireplace, Thomas collaborated with local artist Jay Sylvester on a sculpture of foraged branches surrounding a bull’s-eye mirror. The reflection ensures that even someone seated with their back to the bay gets a view. The family’s routines shift with the seasons, which in turn shape how they use the house. Winter draws everyone toward the living-room fireplace, where the sofa is covered in a Schumacher fabric reminiscent of an American rag rug and throw pillows are made from textiles Thomas found in Turkey. From May through October, life moves out to the porch, where varied flexible seating facilitates long dinners and several conversations at once.
