Barnes Coy Architects

Barnes Coy Architects was founded in Bridgehampton in 1993 by Robert Barnes and Christopher Coy, friends since a childhood sailing program in Amagansett. The firm designs modern single-family houses — glass-walled, built of durable materials, organized around the site and the light. Barnes had worked for Norman Jaffe before the partnership. He died in 2018; Coy continues the practice.

Two houses in Alastair Gordon's 2020 monograph on the firm, Assembled in Light, show what makes Barnes Coy useful to a South Fork buyer to understand: the form of the house is often the visible result of a regulatory line.

Who they are

Barnes and Coy worked for large New York firms before deciding to concentrate on single-family houses, which Coy has called "the front line of architecture." The two principals co-designed every project before handing it to staff. Gordon has noted that through the 1980s and 1990s, when many postwar modern houses were being replaced by neo-traditional ones, the firm kept to modernism.

The documented houses

Liquidity, Water Mill. An 11,000-square-foot oceanfront house with glass curtain walls on its north and south faces and a 10-foot-deep glass swimming pool raised 20 feet above grade for ocean views, its east wall forming the back of an indoor parlor. A long curve on the north side follows the required setback from a saltwater pond.

Inversion, Wainscott. An oceanfront house whose plan follows the coastal erosion hazard line — the edge of the Coastal Erosion Hazard Area, the state-mapped zone where new building and some rebuilding need a special permit (see oceanfront property). According to Coy, local zoning at the time allowed a pitched roof to rise to 32 feet but a flat roof only to 25. The architects wanted the height of the first and the look of the second, so they built a pitched roof upside down: an inverted pyramid, clad in teak, that reads as a sculpture inside.

88 Meadow Lane, Southampton Village (renovation). About 15 years before 2021, Barnes Coy renovated and enlarged a late-1970s Jaffe house, adding a wing and an egg-shaped pool house. Coy said the firm followed Jaffe's lines so the result would look as if it had been built at once. In the 2021 demolition hearing he agreed it was by then less than half Jaffe's work.

What to look for

• Large glazed walls and open, light-driven plans; see contemporary modern.
• Geometry that answers a setback, erosion line or height limit. When a Barnes Coy house has an unusual shape, ask which rule produced it.
• On older houses, careful continuations of an earlier architect's design — which complicates attribution later.

How to verify an attribution

Ask the firm for drawings and confirm the architect of record on the permit. Distinguish new houses from renovations and additions. For oceanfront houses, read the survey and approvals for the coastal erosion hazard line, wetland setbacks and height determinations that shaped the design, since a future change will be held to the same lines.

Considering a Barnes Coy house?

Request a property brief from The Roebling Research Desk that reads the house against the setbacks and limits that shaped it, separates original design from later additions, and sets out what can and cannot change.