If Athena, and Victor Calderone, first saw the beach home in Amagansett, New York, which would later be their getaway, It seemed like love at first glance, but not in the manner one might think. “There were big bulbs of black mold hanging from the ceiling,” says Victor, a DJ of house music and producer who remixed tracks of Madonna, Sting, Beyonce, and many others. “The roof was leaking in a number of places and had almost collapsed near the fireplace.”
“The smell was awful,” says Athen, a co-founder of Interior design company Rawlins Calderone Design. “And it was filled with mosquitoes.” And that’s not even to forget the dead deer who was a winter resident in the swimming pool. However, the couple could see lots of possibilities. After a year of seeking an Hamptons vacation spo,t the Calderones are within Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood; they had not found anything like i—aA 1960s home with a clean design and clerestory windows that let in lots of sunlight.
“We were never Hamptons people, had never done summer shares or spent time out here,” Athena says. Athena. Victor has a busy schedule, often performing in places like Miami or Ibiza, Spain, so the idea of a getaway for a few days didn’t appear to be in the plans. However, 2008 Athena and their boy, Jivan, visited Montauk when Victor was on vacation. “Jivan was rolling in the grass, running around, and climbing trees, and I felt that we needed that in our lives,” she says.
When they finally found the perfect place, they decided to design the space to reflect their individuality. “Some friends said, ‘You have to put midcentury-modern furniture in a midcentury-modern home,'” Athena says. Athena. “But why? The house was already so modern that I wanted to warm it up.” She began to collect antique and vintage furniture and accessories from local stores such as Brooklyn Flea and dealers of old-fashioned oddities and industrial items such as Obsolete from Venice, California, and Factory 20 in Abingdon, Virginia. She added texture by putting wood boards made from reclaimed pine on the interior surfaces, repurposing wooden beams into kitchen shelves, and adding leather pulls for the bathroom and kitchen cabinets.