R eed and Delphine Krakoff have lived in some enviable houses in their 25 years together. They have shared a seven-story town house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side; a Connecticut estate built by copper heiress Huguette Clark; a Parisian hôtel particulier; and Lasata, once the East Hampton, New York, summer home of the young Jacqueline Bouvier, which they sold in 2018. (It is now owned by fashion designer and filmmaker Tom Ford.)
How, then, have the couple and their four children ended up in a set of bunkers just down the beach from Ford, buffered from the elements by several tons of sand and reinforced concrete?
“It’s not a midlife crisis,” says Delphine Krakoff. “It’s not like, ‘We’re in our 50s and we need a contemporary house.’”
The Krakoffs’ new corner of Long Island has a wild, precarious beauty. East of Amagansett, the land pinches down to a narrow fold between Napeague Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, and seafood shacks line the two-lane highway. Modest houses, mostly wood-framed, dot the shoreline. The giddy architectural experimentation that has transformed so much of the Hamptons has barely made a mark here.
After buying a few acres of land on the ocean side, in 2018 the couple began working with New York architects Thomas Phifer and Partners, who designed a house that the pair then finished on their own five years later. The Krakoffs—she is an interior designer, he is a fashion designer and creative director—had a clear idea of what they wanted, and the surroundings dictated many of their decisions. In the changing coastal light, the result of their efforts can look like a mirage: a pale-concrete platform embedded among the dunes, with three transparent boxes rising from it. In the manner of a space station or an Apple store, these boxes serve as viewing rooms and also portals, connecting to a network of other living areas, in this case bedrooms for the couple’s children and guests. A wall installation by French conceptualist Daniel Buren runs the length of a concrete passageway.
Perry Guillot, a landscape architect who has worked with the couple many times, admires the way “the muted colors of the interior blend so seamlessly with that vast presentation of real nature all around.” Though Guillot wasn’t involved here—the Krakoffs did their own landscaping—he thinks the native pine, bayberry and beach plum they’ve planted suggest that the structure has just slipped down into the dunes, leaving nature undisturbed.
“The house is very controlled and very hard in the middle of an environment that’s completely the opposite,” says Reed. “The tension between the two was the idea.”
He is sitting beside his wife on a sofa in the living room, the largest of the three boxes. (The others hold the couple’s bedroom and a library.) Behind him is a free-edge table by George Nakashima, a translucent resin chair by Joris Laarman and, on the wall, a site-specific painting made with drips and smears of mud by the British artist Richard Long. There is not a straight line among them.
“Everything is essentially a counterpoint to the glass and steel and concrete,” Reed says of the couple’s intentions. “We had in mind things that were organic, artisanal, textural,” he explains, a bridge back to the unencumbered landscape. He points out the imperfections in a cast glass table by Martin Szekely and the hand-carved Shaker chairs around a Pierre Jeanneret dining table. (“It took a few years to find 10,” he says of the chairs. “They didn’t make sets.”)
The kind of collecting the Krakoffs do has a noble lineage, that of tasteful amateurs who brought wealth, scholarship and the thrill of the hunt to furnishing their own houses. For the Krakoffs, a growing obsession with living comfortably among their possessions has been shaking up their longtime buying habits.
“The most difficult thing to do with an interior is to create something that’s special, that has important things, but where you can lie down on a sofa and read a newspaper,” Reed says, his coffee cup balanced on a Georges Jouve low table with a terracotta top, a new purchase. “It shouldn’t be still-life. It’s not sculpture. It’s a home.”
The Krakoffs have invested in several multi-ton sculptures over the years, but by far the biggest pieces they have collected have been houses. Aside from their architectural escapade in the dunes, the couple have sought out houses that, in their view, haven’t been living up to their potential.
A down-to-the-studs restoration typically comes next, which they insist is the fun part. (One of their previous Manhattan town houses, built in 1910 as a single family home, was delivered to them as 11 individual apartments.)
A new house offers them a fresh perspective on their possessions. Buying Lasata, Delphine says, became an opportunity for them to open the book on Americana; they amassed Boston and Philadelphia Queen Anne furniture, folding it in with pieces they already owned by Diego Giacometti, Karl Springer and Adolf Loos, among others. “Design is how you approach things, how you process things like color, shape, tension, juxtaposition,” says Reed.
“Every time we move something, it becomes new again, because it is never in a similar situation,” Delphine observes. Serendipitously for the Krakoffs, this process has led to an ongoing chicken-and-egg debate. Should the collection accrue for the houses, or should the houses accrue for the collection?
Over a 35-year career in fashion, first at Anne Klein, Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger, and later at Coach and Tiffany & Co., Reed has achieved the kind of success that reshapes companies into global luxury brands. In 2022, he joined the private equity firm L Catterton as a Strategic Advisor and the Creative Chairman of John Hardy, the group’s luxury jewelry brand.
“The house is very controlled and very hard in the middle of an environment that’s completely the opposite. The tension between the two was the idea.”
He has been collecting since his school days, as has Delphine, who heads the firm Pamplemousse Design. Though the couple have an eclectic buying history, their contributions have been especially meaningful to the markets of living designers. Describing a common thread among those they support, Reed says, “They’re doing something that is changing the way people think about art or design. It always comes down to that. Take Marc Newson—his Lockheed Lounge chair changed the way people look at design. Ron Arad, Mattia Bonetti, Les Lalanne, Jean Prouvé, obviously—all iconoclasts, moving the dialogue forward.”
No surprise, then, when Delphine maintains, “We have no fads in our collecting.” They do, however, have one rule. “Buy what you love,” Reed says. “Buy what you love,” Delphine seconds.
Who gets veto power? If they disagree—which happens, though rarely—they pass.
By now they operate with something of a shared aesthetic. A geometric simplicity that feels both modern and timeless creeps into many of their houses, as do mirrors, serpentine staircases, a lambent shade of white and a staggering range of textures—animal, vegetable and mineral. The style gadfly and author Simon Doonan has called their approach “Krakoff-izing: Improbable juxtapositions are the order of the day.”
Their individual contributions to a project tend to break down along alphabetical lines. Reed does the research, Delphine does the development. “I’m usually the one who makes things happen,” she says, meaning restoration, shipping and installation.
For both of them, the overlap between their personal and professional lives keeps collecting new. A decorating client might own a piece that opens a door for Delphine. Recently, it was textile art: “Reed and I had not really looked at it until my interest was piqued by a client’s collection.”
In Reed’s case, objects he already owns can inform his design thinking. During his time at Tiffany, he found the work of mid-century industrial designer Van Day Truex relevant for its prosaic twist on luxury—the kind of unexpected, oppositional stance he adores. “Tiffany had always been about that juxtaposition of American utilitarianism and elevated refinement,” Reed says. Truex himself had worked for the company; with his invention of bamboo-handled flatware and woven-silver berry baskets, Reed says, Truex matched the throwaway glamor of Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany,” dining out of a paper bag in her Givenchy gown and pearls.
In 2010, Reed griped to Vogue that the design market “has become like the stock market.” Today, he estimates that the value of the Lalanne sheep the couple bought two decades ago has increased by a factor of 20. They’ve held onto them partly for sentimental reasons, having published a book on Les Lalanne’s work and become friends with Claude Lalanne before she died in 2019. The Jean Royère Ours Polaire sofa they purchased 15 years ago isn’t something they’d buy again, he admits, given its inflated price. “Being so ubiquitous, a piece just becomes a commodity,” he says.
During the slow, uneventful days of the pandemic, Reed took up ceramics working in a studio at their Connecticut house. Now Amagansett is stocked with wheel-thrown plates and bowls—brown for the living area, ivory for their bedroom. “He’s the artist,” Delphine jokes. “I’m the patroness.”
When the house was finally nearing completion, Richard Long showed up at the beach to make his painting. “He came with his mud and his scaffold,” recalls Reed, who found the artist’s literal hands-on process entrancing. Reed was surprised to learn that the slurry spilling onto the drop cloths like so much chocolate milk came not from England, but from Mississippi. “I think it’s the color he likes,” Reed says.
Long’s work only lasted a day: After staying overnight and walking the beach, he was back on a plane the next afternoon. “He was super easy,” Reed says, a high compliment in his book. “He let me film him. He was really a pleasure. And it felt right. The whole thing just felt right.”
