Bank Statement

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There's something about being on the water

that's freeing and stops me in time,

and takes me back to feeling like I'm a kid again.

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This home is a very personal expression of who I am,

and forces us to pay attention and to slow down,

and to admire and have a reverence for the natural world

in a way that we could never imagine.

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My name's Jamie Bush, and I'm an interior designer.

I spend most of my time in L.A.,

but we have this magical little houseboat

that we come back to every so often here on Long Island.

Our family has deep roots here.

We had family farms here.

So my great uncle and my great grandfather,

his father had dairy farms on Long Island,

and my sister and my father

still have a farm here in South Haven,

which is really close to where we are here.

This location, and also the way that we

reimagined this place is very much

harking back to my childhood, growing up on Fire Island.

Over there, there's no vehicles.

Everything is boardwalk, and you're barefoot.

My parents, in 1960,

they bought this crazy little tiny beach house,

this un-winterized shack on Fire Island

in this neighborhood called Davis Park

that we would go to as kids,

which evoked a total freedom of running around

basically just with a bathing suit on for months on end.

That house at the time was very much

an inspiration for this place.

Having this as an adult is such a privilege,

and such a refuge for myself and my partner, Jarrell,

because it's completely detached from reality.

You're incredibly affected by the shifts in winds,

and the weathers or a hurricane, or intense sunshine.

We bought the houseboat about nine years ago.

We found it.

It was in rough shape.

It was really dated, from the 70s.

We stripped it down to the open framing,

very much like Frank Garry would strip down

existing buildings at the beginning of his career,

and bring texture and natural dimension,

but then also adding plywood and cedar,

that is very much a language that you would find

in these Fire Island beach houses

by Andrew Geller and Horace Gifford

that have a humility and an honest integrity

of these simple, almost industrial hardware store materials.

And so, the kitchen was made backwards

by finding Ikea cabinets that were in stainless steel,

and then capping them with natural walnut slab countertop.

It's almost kit of parts of finding ready-made objects,

or things that could be refashioned into something custom

that would functionally work here.

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For a punch of color that's very reminiscent

of the colors in my parents' beach house,

we brought in this bright yellow Magistretti lamp.

It is such a great, iconic pop of color.

The kitchen and dining area was raised

because there's a bilge underneath it

that holds the pumps and the tanks.

And the living room steps down,

which is such a great feature.

And what we ended up doing is stepping into this design

and building in all these day beds in the living room,

and then stepping back up into this floating dock beyond.

All the sofas are made from twin beds.

We wanted the idea

that we could sleep nine people here in a crunch,

and so, we upholstered the mattresses and made toppers,

but then built them all around this set dimension

so everything could be easily changed out,

but easily sleep three people in the living room.

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The design of our main bedroom was very much the idea

to conjure up an image of the Bento box,

a warm, luminous, glowing, wooden crafted space

that had a very low ceiling,

and by bringing your horizon

lying down with the slatted bench

plays with the sense of scale and the height of the room.

One heroic element is this incredible

Castiglioni ceiling light that is vintage,

that they no longer make this scale anymore,

but it really becomes this square moon

in the center of the space.

The back bedroom, it's sort of a multifunctional room,

because it's a bedroom, office.

We have some turn-of-the-century carved Long Island geese

that were from my great uncle's dairy farm in East Hampton.

Originally it was two stories,

and we put a third story on, which we call the doghouse,

to capture these incredible views of the wetlands.

We wanted to create the deck of a tug boat,

almost the prow of a ship

of where the captain would steer the vessel.

That's another multifunctional space

that we created with restaurant-supply stainless steel sink,

and refrigerator so we could have drinks up on the rooftop.

And then there's a built-in day bed,

another place where somebody could sleep

and/or crash for the night.

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Living on a houseboat has really taught us

the fragility of our time here

and the impermanence of this place.

This may not last forever,

so we try to make the most of it.

Leaving here is always a strange experience

in the sense that unlike any other place I've ever lived in,

we worry about her, about Xanadu, about this vessel

that is fragile and precarious, unlike a house on land.

And so, it's very much a feeling of a parental aspect

of leaving your child alone on their own

to fend for themselves.

So it's always bittersweet when we have to say goodbye.

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