When Marc Payot, the president of Hauser & Wirth, and his wife, Susanne Mack Payot bought their modernist, Barbara Neski—designed Water Mill home in 2018, they knew they would have to make some big decisions. Would they alter the small garage/guesthouse at the mouth of the two-acre property? Should they abandon an eclectic mix of evergreens and re-landscape the grounds? Did they want to keep a small stable on the property that once housed a donkey and a cow?
A busy life intervened on many of these questions (despite an enthusiastic yes from the couple’s then-teenage daughters, Susanne recalls with a laugh that the question of the donkey was an open-and-shut case), and the matter of the house was still top of mind for the couple in September 2023, when Marc sat down for lunch with his friend and frequent collaborator, architect Annabelle Selldorf.
Even though the pair had worked together on several notable projects (including Hauser & Wirth’s 22nd Street gallery in New York, which opened during the pandemic, as well as its Savile Row outpost in London), and Marc was dreaming of building an addition to the Water Mill house, he was adamant that he wouldn’t pitch Selldorf. “I didn’t want to mix business with private,” he recalls.
But that boundary was short-lived; as soon as Selldorf came out East to visit later that year, the deal was sealed. The Payots hadn’t realized that Neski, who was heavily influenced by legendary architect Marcel Breuer, had been Selldorf’s professor at Pratt in the 1980s. “She was quite tough,” Selldorf told me of Neski. “I loved her.” Once they connected the dots, Selldorf was unequivocal; she told Marc, “You can’t give this to anyone else.”
Thus began the pair’s most personal collaboration yet: a neo-Brutalist-style all-white addition to Payot’s Hamptons escape that was completed early last summer. Selldorf’s contribution left the historic house, with its “typical Bauhaus features—narrow windows and a round staircase,” where, Selldorf notes, “Neski very much looks at Breuer,” untouched.
Selldorf’s addition is linked to the original structure via a glass-walled corridor that acts as an artery between the house’s two halves. “On the new side, Annabelle respects and continues in a more contemporary way,” says Marc. By the time the architect was done, the home’s original footprint had stretched from 4,500 to about 8,000 square feet.
On a beautiful late-August afternoon under cloudless blue skies, I make my way down the property’s lengthy beige gravel driveway, noting several works situated among the lush landscaping. When the Payots welcome me at the door, I ask about the serene white sculpture by Italian artist Marisa Albanese, Combattente, 2013, in front of the garage. “She’s kind of protecting the house,” Marc says. Nearby, Phyllida Barlow’s PRANK: hoax; 2022/23, which depicts a figure atop a collapsed piano, nods to Susanne’s career as a cabaret performer. “I’m always thinking it could be nice to have a concert here,” she says, nodding to the grounds.
Inside, the space simply flows. Susanne points out numerous colorful works by the couple’s close friend, Mary Heilmann. A striped painting in the kitchen, a work on paper near Marc’s office, and a row of cups perched on a living room bookshelf are all tributes to the artist, who passed away days before my visit. It was Heilmann who first encouraged Marc and Susanne to venture out to Eastern Long Island after they arrived in New York from Switzerland in 2008. (Though they maintain an apartment in the city, noise in the metropolis has driven them out East for much of the year.)
Beyond the Heilmanns, the constellation of works hung throughout the house’s spacious living room, dining room, bedrooms, and gym includes a mix of stars from the Hauser & Wirth stable (Rita Ackermann, Louise Bourgeois, George Condo, Roni Horn, Rashid Johnson, and Cindy Sherman, to name a few) alongside the likes of Vija Celmins and Wolfgang Tillmans.
The standout, if such a thing is possible, is the Mika Rottenberg chandelier, made of driftwood and brightly colored “mushrooms,” that floats over the dining room table. (Visitors to Hauser & Wirth’s Manuela restaurant in downtown New York will already be familiar with the work—a similar one hangs there.)
The couple’s daughters did not get their wish for a donkey; the stables were ultimately transformed into Susanne’s music studio and a part-time guesthouse. But Robert Davis’s Ass, Self- Portrait, after Jacques-Laurent Agasse, 2021, a playful allusion to that long-ago standoff, hangs in the guest bedroom.
One is struck, even while touring the inside of the house, by the landscape design that greets the eye through every window. At Selldorf’s recommendation, the Payots hired landscape designer Abby Clough Lawless, who kept many of the property’s original evergreens and reincorporated some weeping willows at the property’s entrance.
Despite the area’s reputation as a peak-summer destination, the couple has long relished the quieter winter months out East. “We appreciate the evergreens even more in the winter,” says Marc as we take in the landscape from the wide windows in the master bedroom. He draws my attention to the lush foliage, the pool, and then to a sprawling field that, he says, “leaves plenty of space for future sculptures.”
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