At Home With: Tory Burch's Southampton Home

New York based fashion designer Tory Burch has built up a multimillion dollar business in a relativley short space of time based mainly... on herself? Raised from a fashion background with a mother who favoured Parisian chic and a father who designed his own suits & hermes scarves Tory feels fashion and style are in her blood. She has transformed a Gatsby-era Southampton Manor into a convival enviromnemt for family living.

Following a flood, she was planning to drastically remodel her nearby home, a light-filled but architecturally undistinguished summer place on the water’s edge. But when a friend took her to see this majestic home, she immediatley fell in love with the similarity to the Anglophile houses on Philadelphia’s Main Line, where she had grown up among her parents collections of all things antique and intriguing.  

Not wanting it to look shiny and new, Burch trawled the auction houses and local estate sales for antique furnishings, which she mixed with pieces from her Long Island and Pennsylvania houses and well-loved treasures from her parents. Burch worked with two old friends to blend these elements harmoniously: her long-time collaborator, the architect and designer Daniel Romualdez, and decorator Eve Hood. “Architecturally speaking, the house is set up in a formal way,” adds Hood, “but Tory wanted it to be open and inviting, so we used warm colours and comfortable furnishings. Unlike her last house, nothing says ‘seashore’—she didn’t want a summerhouse but instead one that felt right at Thanksgiving and Christmas, a house that she could come to every weekend.”

Rachel x

Article by Hamish Bowles for Vogue. Images by Francois Harland.