Helena Clunies-Ross designed the East Hampton Residence as a deliberate inversion of her client's public-facing work. Natalie De Banco, the founder of Bronx and Banco, needed a home that functioned as the opposite of spectacle: a space of stillness rather than performance, restoration rather than display. The 3,500-square-foot extension on Long Island's East End begins from that tension and builds every material choice around resolving it.

Clunies-Ross, drawing from her fine art training and her years as Design Director at Anouska Hempel, developed what she calls a Calma philosophy, treating light, shadow, and natural materials as emotional tools rather than purely visual ones. A preserved cherry tree, now framed by floor-to-ceiling glass, establishes the organizing principle: the building wraps around the existing landscape rather than displacing it, keeping the boundary between interior retreat and exterior vitality deliberately porous.

The material palette reads as a direct counterpoint to the high-gloss surfaces of luxury retail. Stone, timber, and linen create an environment that invites touch and registers the passage of time. Custom slatted timber screens modulate daylight throughout the residence, diffusing hard sun into softer, more even light that shifts quality hour by hour. The screens also guide sight lines toward specific moments of focus: a meditation nook, a sculptural bathing area, planted zones that dissolve the threshold between room and garden.

Bespoke craft runs throughout. A kitchen pendant designed by Clunies-Ross functions as a focal sculpture. Reclaimed timber in the wellness areas carries visible grain and weathering, material history made legible rather than smoothed away. The basement introduces a controlled shift in register: darker, more enclosed, offering psychological contrast to the light-filled levels above. The move acknowledges that genuine restoration requires both openness and enclosure, and that stillness is not one mood but several.