Inside the Albee Foundation, a century-old barn transformed into a retreat for writers and artists

At the eastern end of Long Island, where wetlands merge into sky and sea, a former horse stable in Montauk has long offered writers and visual artists something increasingly rare: a retreat for focused, uninterrupted work. Now, nearly a century after it was built and 60 years after the playwright Edward Albee recast it as a residency, the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center – or, simply, The Barn – has, with the help of New York–based architecture studio TenBerke, entered a new chapter.

When Albee established his foundation in 1967, his aim was to ‘serve writers and visual artists from all walks of life by providing time and space in which to work without disturbance’. Since the mid-1960s, that vision has flourished in the rustic, secluded 1920s timber structure once associated with the Montauk Manor resort. When the foundation enlisted TenBerke, the question was not how to reinvent the 3,300 sq ft Barn, but how to understand and rehabilitate it.

On an initial site visit, TenBerke senior principal Ameet Hiremath recalls being struck by the building’s spare beauty. It was a place where ‘the stillness of the site and the bare-bone spaces combined with wildly imaginative work happening’, he says. Writers worked in bed; others used the desk from which Albee composed his works. Painters spilled outside from studios. ‘Artistic work and thought happen anywhere and everywhere,’ Hiremath says.

Amid communal living, with residents gathering around food and conversation, the Barn also allowed for solitude and individual rhythms. As writer and multidisciplinary artist Kristen Leigh, an Albee Fellow, reflects, ‘Everything about The Barn wants to be noticed, explored, thought about more deeply – all of it becomes creative material.’

But the beloved structure was also unheated, uninsulated and ageing. Albee had anticipated the need for intervention, and, prior to his death in 2016, he allocated resources and direction so that the foundation could broaden its scope. The foundation’s members wanted it to operate year-round, expanding access to more artists. It was desperately in need of remediation if the programme was to continue. The challenge was to repair and modernise it – while restoring surrounding wetlands with native plantings – introducing accessibility, heating, cooling and other creature comforts without losing the building’s barn-like quality or its spirit of experimentation.

TenBerke approached the project through subtraction followed by addition. The team stripped the building back to its timber frame, exposing its skeletal structure. ‘Old buildings are super cranky,’ Hiremath notes. ‘They’re humbling to work on.’ Nothing was plumb; bays that appeared identical were subtly irregular. The team drew half a dozen versions of the floor plans, ultimately guided by what the building would allow.

A second floor was inserted within the gambrel roof volume, creating four bedrooms with private bathrooms connected by a shared library housing Albee’s books and records. Below, a communal kitchen anchors the entry, while studios link to the outdoors, allowing residents to maintain a constant connection to the surrounding landscape. Mechanical systems and an elevator are threaded quietly through thickened walls and attic cavities, so occupants always feel they are in a barn. The material palette is limited and functional: polished concrete floors on the ground level, white pine plank upstairs, and plain white walls throughout.

The architects allowed themselves one conspicuous edit: the roof dormer. They replaced a series of ad-hoc peaked dormers with a single elongated form set within the gambrel’s slope. ‘It was the perfect example of distilling down what we found into something that felt fundamental,’ says Hiremath. Insulation was layered above the rafters, leaving the structure exposed, in a way that preserves the slender roof profile – a sleight of hand that maintains The Barn’s silhouette.

Throughout, repetition governs the composition. Windows – which are all identical –march across elevations in alignment with the ten structural bays and hem-fir scissor trusses. ‘How do you do the most with the fewest set of operations?’ Hiremath asks. The resulting quiet order lends the space a solemnity that mirrors the seriousness of the work undertaken within it.

Just as important was preserving some of the patina. During construction, the team considered the scissor trusses, marked by nail stains, chew marks from horses and notes scrawled by former residents. Rather than stain or blend old and new timber, the team chose restraint. ‘Let’s not beautify them,’ members of the foundation urged. With only the necessary shoring up, the trusses remain as found, their history palpable.

The modest Cottage, rebuilt on the footprint of a former structure, complements The Barn. Designed as a live-work space for the caretaker – himself a painter – it centres on a large, light-filled room oriented towards wetlands long enjoyed from that vantage. Walls are arranged to support painting; the plan is simple, adaptable. It ties back to the ethos of The Barn, Hiremath notes. ‘Keep it simple – open up the possibility to inhabit it in many different ways.’