April 27, 2025For Damian and Britt Zunino, the husband-and-wife team behind the New York City architecture and interiors firm Studio DB, creating their cherished weekend home upstate has been a journey — one that’s lasted well over a decade and counting. “There are always projects we’re doing there, or we’re thinking about what we can do next,” says Damian, a Yale University–trained architect who designed the house as a year-round retreat to share with his wife and their four kids, now between the ages of 10 and 19, as well as extended family and friends. “We just keep creating and filling things in, whether with the furniture or the landscaping. It’s always kind of evolving.”
Britt and Damian bought their bucolic 12.5-acre property in Amenia, New York, in 2011, having outgrown the small guest cottage at his parents’ home in nearby Kent, Connecticut, that had been their getaway. But with a practice and family that were both expanding, it took Damian nearly four years to come up with a concept that felt right. “Britt and I didn’t necessarily agree,” he says. “Plus, we kept having kids, so the parameters kept changing.”
The final design was for a 4,100-square-foot, five-bedroom residence built into a sloped clearing surrounded by woodlands. Conceived to maximize light and views, the two-story main volume has a classic rectangular gable-roof silhouette, but in the back, the top level is cut away, the sides enclosing a void. Another unexpected element of this “deconstructed” design, as Damian describes it, is the open-air courtyard he inserted into the center of the house.
There’s also a concrete lower level, partially embedded into the hillside, that contains the garage, a guest room and casual family spaces that open onto a minimalist swimming pool edged with reclaimed gray granite. The house’s overall vibe is distinctly contemporary, amplified by the dusky charcoal-hued siding and asymmetrical windows framed in warm, copper-toned wood veneer. The same material lines the plant-filled interior courtyard, which the Zuninos sometimes use for sleeping out under the stars.
“It’s nice to feel like we’re always very much connected to our surroundings,” says Damian, who notes that the expansive glass doors are left open when the weather is warm, both for ventilation (the house is designed for passive cooling and does not have air-conditioning) and to enable a free-flowing indoor-outdoor lifestyle.
“In the summer, the kids and friends are constantly going between the house and the pool,” says Britt, who studied interior design at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in New York. “From a practicality standpoint, we wanted everything to be really comfortable and easy. Most of the floors are concrete, so we wouldn’t have to worry about them, and the furnishings are cozy and soft and easy to clean.”
The home is featured in Studio DB’s first monograph, Drawn Together, recently published by Rizzoli, which highlights 13 residential projects by the Zuninos. Since launching their firm, in 2007, the couple have developed a reputation for creating lively and livable spaces shot through with personality and distinctive details. Their work often employs rich material textures, sumptuous color and eye-catching pattern; this home is actually a bit quieter and more pared down than is typical for them.
That was partly due to their wanting a low-key escape with interiors that didn’t compete with the views. “There’s such a major impact of color from all the greenery, and in the fall, everything’s just golden and red and really dramatic,” says Britt. She points out too that when they moved in, 10 years ago, their investment in the property and the construction left them with somewhat limited resources for the interiors.
They got creative, bartering with colleagues and clients, as well as buying at sample sales, auctions and local antiques markets. And they sourced a number of pieces on 1stDibs. “For years, 1stDibs has been a go-to resource, whether buying for ourselves or for client projects — not just antique and vintage but also contemporary furnishings,” says Britt, noting that she also shops for vintage jewelry and fashion on the site.
Over the past few years, they’ve refined the initial “hodgepodge,” she says, upgrading and reupholstering furniture and “layering cozier things.” As in all their projects, the duo has turned to trusted makers and vendors, many of them longtime acquaintances from the city or upstate. “The house is filled with stuff from friends and neighbors, and I love that personal connection,” says Britt. “We’re always trying to tell a story or buy pieces that have a story.”
That story starts in the entry, where the Zuninos hung a chic Italian-modern-inspired glass pendant light from Blue Green Works, the design studio cofounded by their friend Peter Staples. There’s also a geometric-pattern rug in watery blues designed for Temple Studio by another pal, Joanna Williams, of Kneeland Co., and a circular hanging mirror that is one of several pieces in the home by BDDW, a firm they’ve worked with for many years.
In the kitchen, the couple initially left the hood above the La Cornue range (bought refurbished) as a plain white box. But when the opportunity arose, they bought a selection of BDDW hand-decorated tiles they had used in a project for a client and applied them to the hood. The tiles’ painterly blue trees, flowers and mountains echo the landscape outside, while adding some artful whimsy to the crisp, modern space.
In the adjacent dining area, a family heirloom table, typically covered with spirited Dutch wax fabrics from Britt’s collection, is surrounded with a quartet of walnut chairs by Michael Robbins, an upstate furniture designer, plus a couple of vintage Gian Franco Legler rattan chairs, one acquired years ago on 1stDibs. An Isamu Noguchi Akari floor lamp stands in the corner, while a globe-cluster light by Apparatus — another studio owned by friends — floats above.
Throughout the entertaining spaces, the couple used furnishings with warm wood tones, along with soft textures to contrast with the concrete floors. A plush Nordic Knots carpet with a raised geometric pattern sprawls across the living room, where everyone has a favorite perch. That includes the Zuninos’ golden Labrador retriever, Marlowe, who is partial to the lavender-upholstered daybed next to the glass doors, an ideal position for keeping an eye on the backyard.
Britt, for her part, can often be found curled up in a vintage Martin Eisler and Carlo Hauner sofa sporting a slatted-wood frame with elegantly curved ends. Her father, when he visits, prefers the Milo Baughman metal-frame chairs the couple sourced from 1stDibs. Britt recently recovered them in an embroidered denim-like Guatemalan fabric used for traditional women’s skirts, which she found in Dallas while working on fashion designer Lela Rose’s flagship boutique.
At the living room’s far end, a sculptural molded-wood chair by Peter Karpf that Britt bought in the late ’90s stands next to a low BDDW cabinet hosting one of the home’s multiple ceramic lamps by Dumais Made, the studio of their friend Charlie Dumais, in nearby Litchfield, Connecticut. Hanging on the wall above the cabinet is a large, dizzyingly patterned collage by the artist collective Ghost of a Dream, one of many pieces the couple own by artists with a connection to the Wassaic Project, a local organization that organizes artist residencies, exhibitions and educational programs. Damian’s sister, Bowie Zunino, and her husband, Jeff Barnett-Winsby, are codirectors.
When it came to decorating the bedrooms, it’s not surprising that the teenage kids of designer parents would have some opinions. Their son, the eldest, pushed to recast his room in a darker color scheme; the result is a palette of deep, plummy purples and claret reds, with accent pieces like an old Alfa Romeo Poster and a Carl Auböck leather Butterfly chair. Their oldest daughter got a recent update with a Fornasetti cloud wallpaper in an ombré that shifts from dusty pinks to silvery blues, as well as a distressed Moroccan-style rug from Marc Phillips. “She wanted to do wallpaper, and we were trying to figure out what she could age into,” Britt says. “But it was still sweet. We love the idea of the clouds.”
Britt and Damian’s bedroom suite occupies the entire top floor, comprising a sitting room, a sleeping area and a large bath that manages to enjoy both complete privacy and wide-open vistas. Taking advantage of this, they placed a freestanding tub along the windows where they can indulge in scenic soaks. “We wanted the tub to just float in front of the view and have this really serene moment,” says Damian.
Slowly adding and revising, the couple have introduced rugs bought in Morocco that offer sumptuousness around their bed and in front of their bathroom vanity. Next to their bed, a prototype BDDW lacquered cabinet with porthole-like openings — “a weird one-off” acquired at one of the studio’s auctions, says Britt — adds unique character beneath a photograph taken aboard a boat by Damian’s brother-in-law, Barnett-Winsby.
“Everything now has layers,” says Damian, “whether things we have collected or gotten from a friend or an artist we know, or something we’ve reupholstered in a fabric that we found. It all feels like it reflects us and how we live.”
But, being designers, the Zuninos can point to any number of things they’d like to change, such as the aging cabinets in the kitchen and the artificial-turf-covered terraces off the couple’s bedroom that Damian envisions redoing with a profusion of plants. Oh, and pretty much everything on the lower level, which they both agree needs a major overhaul.
“It’s a nice place to be able to experiment,” says Damian. “This house, for us, is a fun creative outlet.”
