Fallen Leaves


There’s the sultry ocean breeze. And a trace of fall nippiness. Belinda Berman-Real, her husband, Terry Real, and their sons, Justin and Alexander, assemble on the prowlike third-floor deck of their Martha’s Vineyard home. They’ve come to witness the setting sun turn horsetail clouds into spun gold.

“We really built the house around the sunset and the lighthouse,” says Belinda. “We wanted to make the landscape the primary focus—keep the focus outside.”


There’s the sultry ocean breeze. And a trace of fall nippiness. Belinda Berman-Real, her husband, Terry Real, and their sons, Justin and Alexander, assemble on the prowlike third-floor deck of their Martha’s Vineyard home. They’ve come to witness the setting sun turn horsetail clouds into spun gold.

“We really built the house around the sunset and the lighthouse,” says Belinda. “We wanted to make the landscape the primary focus—keep the focus outside.”

The Giving Trees
INSPIRED BY THEIR FIRST FALL VISIT, THE COUPLE NAMED THE house “Fallen Leaves.” “When we first went to the site, there were a lot of leaves on the ground,” says Cambridge-based architect Maryann Thompson. “The fallen leaves gave us the idea of how to let light in through the roof—just as the leaves were layering themselves on top of each other. We had to be very sensitive to light because the site is basically north-¬facing with a busy road to the south. What we did was bring the southern light in through the roof in horizontal bands, and this made for horizontal bands inside, like sundials.”

Maximizing light, air and space was Thompson’s main design test during the four-year project. The challenge was brought home to Thompson and project manager William Pevear on their first visit to the site—though it’s on the beachy “up-island” end, there was no ocean view at all.

“And so William and I stood on top of my car and, lo and behold, it was there: a beautiful view,” says Thompson. “So we made an upside-down house with the living room on the second level. There you see an example of what’s called a ‘borrowed landscape,’ where the foreground view of a neighboring house is cut off by the outside deck to accentuate the distant view—the perfect view of a distant blue stripe of water.”

“What we try to do in our practice is to create spatial sequences that are based on the tradition of landscape design,” says Thompson. “It’s the use of ‘hide and reveals’ letting space unfold. Starting with the driveway. Instead of a direct approach, there’s an unfolding, spiraling sequence. There are these little discoveries and viewpoints, and thereby the experience of the site and the house, as well as its interior, becomes much richer.”

Fallen Leaves finally reveals itself at the end of the drive: red cedar clapboards, white cedar trim, a grayish California stucco chimney, mahogany doors, brilliant aircraft-grade stainless-steel screens, sinks, faucets and pillars. Hardly one right angle but, again, gentle, as though growing organically out of the landscape—leaf upon leaf.

The spiraling effect of the drive continues right to the south-facing facade and entrance of the house. Behind the front door is a surprisingly tiny vestibule that half-twists like a conch. At first Belinda and Terry resisted this idea, the compression of this purposefully petite space. But then the drama of it dawned on them. You come out of this compressed spiral into the full ocean light flooding in upstairs. It’s a “wow” moment.

Natural Selection
BELINDA, WHO IS A PSYCHOTHERAPIST, served as the project’s interior designer. “I first wanted a traditional Vineyard house,” Belinda says. “When we met with Maryann to discuss the project, she kept showing me pictures to get a feel for what we liked. I found that I kept going back to a very modern building. It turned out that this was the Atlantic Center for the Arts that Maryann had designed in Florida. I had no idea.”

But Terry deserves credit, too. A psychotherapist as well, he’s author of the best sellers How Can I Get Through to You? and I Don’t Want to Talk About It. (Says Jane Fonda: “I Don’t Want to Talk About It helped me understand why I’ve been married three times.”) It’s just a guess, but it seems the home’s interior expresses some of the liberating insights in Terry’s books. Fallen Leaves has a lot of unusual angles, but they’re gentle, even feminine angles. It’s modern in the positive sense of open and bright with highly refined materials, with none of the banes of modernism—brutal boxiness or jagged exercises in geometry sticking out like sharp elbows.

There’s a wonderful play between steel and wood inside and out. The builder, David Pizzano, used Alaskan yellow cedar to make the huge sliders leading from the living room to the deck and aircraft-grade stainless steel on all the banisters. It’s echoed in the Arclinea kitchen as well as the space-age toilet in the powder room. A strip of stainless steel adorns the maple bed in the master suite, which was custom-made by Vineyard woodworker Doron Katzman. Cedar sliders in the bedroom open to a large mahogany deck virtually doubling the size of the room. A shower with stainless heads is just outside.

The external colors repeat inside, including the green-gray stucco of the fireplace surround, which was crafted by master mason Johnny Hoy. The green-gray itself connects to the natural greens outside, skillfully manipulated by landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh. The bamboo grove he situated outside reflects back to the bamboo flooring throughout the house, with its piped-in radiant heat.

The furniture itself is almost exclusively Ligne Roset at Adesso. It’s a highly tailored scheme that Belinda worked out with Adesso designer Daniel Wood. “I wanted it to be modern but comfortable, not cold and not busy. Muted in color and not attention grabbing,” says Belinda. And, indeed, the seating is low in its profile. For some, modern chairs may be too low or, more to the point, too long a rise up after a few cocktails, but here it works perfectly to enhance Thompson’s strategic framing of the view. There are no stately Louis XIV chair backs blocking your connection to the sea. Nothing between you and a ruddy tree line of maples paralleling the horizon.