Serena Dugan Customizes a Shelter Island Barn to Fuel Her Passions for Both Painting and Entertaining
The bicoastal artist and textile designer crafts a space with versatility and inspiring energy
It’s a five-minute ferry ride from Sag Harbor, New York, to Shelter Island, but for Serena Dugan, it may as well be a transatlantic flight. The bicoastal artist and textile designer, who works out of a light-flooded studio on a pier in Sausalito, California, when she is not on the East End of Long Island, discovered Shelter Island, which she lovingly calls the “antidote to the Hamptons,” after opening the much-beloved interiors shop Serena & Lily in a nearby village in 2013.
Smitten, she found herself a house and justified buying it because it had just enough land to build the studio of her dreams. “There is something mythological about space for artists,” says Dugan, who produces boldly colored abstract paintings and works on paper of geometric forms, their graphic shapes made soft by hazy edges and watercolor-like saturation. “It’s the highest desire to create a place to work that is inspiring, unusual, and removed.”
Dugan called upon All Things Dirt, the firm that not only partnered with her to build the shop but also counts artists Nate Lowman and Michael Heizer among its clients, to fulfill her fantasy. “I am so lucky to have them because they know me inside and out,” she says. “My sole concern was function, but they worked with me to tease out how the exterior and interior would look and feel.”
To that end, the firm focused on proportion, volume, and placement of light. Clad in larch wood stained with a traditional Scandinavian pine tar and linseed oil, the minimalist barn sits facing south to Coecles Harbor and the Mashomack Preserve just beyond. “The light dances across the water and provides a show through the double-height wall of windows all day long,” says Dugan.
The renovation of the main house proved so overwhelming that by the time Dugan got to the barn, she was struggling with decision fatigue and suggested finishing the interior in an almost primitive manner with plywood everywhere and simple lighting. “It was such a beautiful shell. It felt holy,” she says. Instead, Dugan painted the work surfaces and floor, then whitewashed everything else. California Closets helped turn the mezzanine into an ideation space, where a design library and Murphy bed offer up a place to think and hide when she needs a break from houseguests. The space was designed with versatility, a characteristic Dugan puts to good use. Worktables on casters can be combined to accommodate larger projects, pushed against the wall to hold painting supplies, or set end to end to host banquet dinners. When she celebrated her 50th birthday party, she created room for a dance floor by rolling the tables outside to serve food.
“I hope that energy and joy permeate the walls and come through in the art I create,” says Dugan, who is readying the site for an art show in August. “I hope the space will continuously shift. But whatever the case, this is the place where I feel most at peace and the most creative.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Fall Issue under the headline “Creative Refuge.” Subscribe to the magazine.