How They Pulled It Off: A Warm, Woody Foyer That Connects a Long Island Home With Its Garage

Welcome to How They Pulled It Off, where we take a close look at one particularly challenging aspect of a home design and get the nitty-gritty details about how it became a reality.

When a young family reached out to architect Michael Campbell and his New York firm, MCWRK, to turn their uninspiring Long Island house into a peaceful creative sanctuary, he jumped at the opportunity. "The clients are interesting people—they’re both artists—and they wanted to create a very calming retreat."

His clients and their young son, who live in Brooklyn, had been renting a getaway for the past 10 years in Orient, a quiet hamlet at the tip of North Fork. Then in 2023, they bought a single-story house set on two acres a stone’s throw from the beach. But that might be all that it had going for it. "It was built in 1988, with a really odd layout. You entered in a weird spot near the bedrooms, and the public areas were tucked away," says Campbell. "The interiors were kind of boring."

But Campbell’s biggest test lay outside. Twelve feet from the house was a garage with an unfinished, illegally built accessory dwelling unit on top. It lacked electrical, plumbing, or any finishes. "It looked as if they were stopped in the middle of building it," he says. "In that town, they don’t allow a second apartment or smaller house on the property."

Not only did the buildings need to be physically linked, but Campbell also needed to turn these three distinct spaces into one whole, coherent home. The solution, he says, was to build a multifunctional foyer between the house and the garage that could be a connective tissue, uniting these two separate buildings under one roof. He turned the ADU into a studio space and guest accommodation, and reconfigured the awkward layout of the main house, raising ceilings, opening up the kitchen and living area, and concealing the two bedrooms behind a central wall. The new foyer adds a powder room and lots of storage, too, "but it also gave my clients a better way of entering the home," says Campbell. Here’s how he turned two awkward buildings into one functional—and serene—family getaway.

How they pulled it off: A foyer that connects a home with its garage

• An entrance with its own identity: Campbell wanted the foyer to act as a calming, retreat-like threshold to the house. "In this space, the material is different from the rest of the home," he explains. "We put in Flemish charcoal-stained terra-cotta for the floor and Douglas fir plywood on the ceilings and the walls, so everything’s clad in this warm wood material. The terra-cotta has a matte texture, so you get that grounding, earthy feeling before stepping up into the main living space."