Hi there, cuties! I hope your summer is off to a fun and festive start. As you know, Kathy Kuo Home Southampton–which is now officially open as our first-ever physical retail location–is your ultimate destination for shopping, interior design services, and exclusive in-store events. Next up on our calendar? I’m super excited to welcome one of my favorite interior design experts and authors Tricia Foley to KKH Southampton on July 13, from 4pm-6pm, to do a special signing of her latest book A Summer Place: Living by the Sea.
Tricia Foley is a former magazine editor (for many shelter publications like House Beautiful and Victoria), interior design expert, author (13 books!), and a longtime resident of the beautiful Bellport and Brookhaven area of the South Shore of Long Island (where she is also the director of the Historical Society part-time). Her new book is a love letter to this special area out East and features 22 homes–including Tricia’s own stunning, all-white beach house–that speak to the essence of the area in a variety of different ways.
“A Summer Place is really about how people create their homes…there’s such great history mixed with lifestyle here in Bellport and Brookhaven, and that’s what I tried to capture in the book.” –Tricia Foley
To get you all excited for Tricia Foley’s upcoming book signing on July 13–where rosé from Empathy Wines will be flowing alongside copies of Tricia’s book for sale–we caught up with her about design, writing, new projects, and her favorite things about the gorgeous stretch of Long Island that she calls home.
Above photo courtesy of A Summer Place; photo by Marili Forastieri
Tricia Foley
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In broad strokes, tell us a bit about your personal career journey and some of the major touch-points that brought you to where you are today as a designer and author?
My whole career has been about design, all aspects of it–from magazine editorial, to authoring books, to actually designing products, interiors, furniture, and doing advertising and catalogue work. I was a magazine editor for about 25 years–covering interiors, looking for good stories, and sometimes creating editorial stories.
Mostly, I was doing reportage, and reporting on wonderful people and their homes and designs. I think that’s what brought me to this book–once you’re an editor, you never stop being one. I’d be going to events and visiting friends’ houses out here in Brookhaven and so many people were in design–be it fashion or magazines or designing gardens–and so many of their houses were so wonderful. I thought: “Why not do a book of all of these homes?” So that’s exactly what I did!
How would you describe the essence of A Summer Place, and what do you hope readers take away from this book about the area you call home and love so much?
There’s a very relaxed way of living out here–it revolves around the seasons, it revolves around the farm stands, and it revolves around the sense of community. You’re just as likely to find sophisticated New York City people at the farm stand sharing the best tomatoes or at a tag sale or going for ice cream cones as you are anywhere else. It’s a very different place than the Hamptons or back in the city. That’s why I like it here .
The homes I chose for the book all reflect this. They all show a very strong personal style that revolves around gardening, entertaining, collecting–they’re not cookie-cutter homes. We have a historic district and there are very iconic Bellport houses–but then on the outskirts there are farmhouses, and so many young people have been moving out here, and some with young children. They’re just taking these old houses that were kind of tired and bringing them back to life. I love this because another passion of mine is restoration and preservation. To see these older houses come to life with new gardens planted, and being restored in a way that respects the past but breathes new life.
The book also has lots of different styles–it’s not just 19th Century houses. There are some modern houses in the book–there are a couple of art dealers that have beautiful modern houses. There’s an eccentric sculptor who has the house at the end of the book. He actually lives not far from me here in Brookhaven Hamlet…he’s spent the past 25 years just collecting driftwood and old pieces and he’s fashioned them into all these out buildings. He has a Hobbit house compound–it’s amazing.
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What was the process like bringing the book to life, and how did you select homes for the book?
It was a very unique situation because of COVID. A couple of my projects had been put on hold so I told my editor: “I want to do this book now–COVID is happening and I can’t travel or go anywhere else.” Her response was that I wouldn’t be able to get it done in time for an August 2020 deadline, to which I said: “Sure I can! I’ll just see what film I can buy from friends’ houses and the rest I’ll shoot–it’s all within two miles. I’ll just get in the car with my photographer and we’ll just do it.” So I did just that, and that was my COVID project. I was very busy!
“There are 22 houses in the book and I bought the film for 10 and shot the rest. I just made a list of all the people whose homes I’d been to and that I really liked. I tried to find a balance between the whole area, as well as a balance of styles and a balance of people.”
Every house is full of ideas–ideas for entertaining, for living. It’s all about the way that homes are lived in and used. I don’t hit people over the head with it–it’s not a how-to book. My house is all white because I happen to love all white–but one of the other houses in the book is down the road from me and the guy who owns it was a creative director for J.Crew, and his whole house is just filled with pattern and color and antiques and paintings and layers and layers of things. It just shows two different approaches to creating a home–the book is really about how people create their homes.
If someone had never been to Bellport and Brookhaven before, what are some of your musts in the area?
The beaches are beautiful and there’s a big state park nearby, called Smith Point, which everyone from here goes to. There’s a nature preserve and boardwalks, and you’re right on the Atlantic Ocean–and that’s 10 minutes from downtown, which is really amazing.
There are a lot of great new shops, but what’s really interesting is that the little shops that have survived forever are the farm stand, the ice cream store, and the bicycle shop. They are still there and they’ve been there for 30 years–everyone patronizes them and keeps them going. I’d say, get a bicycle and bike around.
I’m director of the Historical Society part time, so that’s another thing that’s really important to me and an important part of the Village. We have a lot of programs for children, for families, for historians, for art historians. We have a lot of events–especially in the summer. We start in May and have something about every two weeks.
A photo of Tricia Foley’s home, as featured in “A Summer Place”; photo by Marili Forastieri
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