Galerie Founder and Editorial Director Lisa Fayne Cohen Reimagines Her East Hampton Home with Help from Designer Scott Sanders
The dreamy oceanfront estate showcases the collector’s extraordinary trove of art and design
The Long Island, New York, home Lisa Fayne Cohen shares with her husband, James, wears its authority quietly. Located on an oceanfront plot in East Hampton, the U-shaped structure is substantial and stately without being insistent, its design hearkening back to august architectural precedents. Rambling, asymmetric volumes with peaked roofs and dormer windows echo the classic Shingle Style of McKim, Mead & White, while the exuberant chimney-scape on top nods to Edwin Lutyens elements deftly combined and brought into the present by architect Andrew Pollock.
The family settled into the residence a decade and a half ago, and it wasn’t long afterward that Cohen began developing the idea for Galerie, which she founded and continues to head as editorial director. She had studied art history at Barnard College and spent years as an interior design editor, taking a special interest in people who lived with art not as punctuation on a wall but as an essential, animating principle of a room. That observation became a conviction, and the conviction became a magazine. At Galerie’s core is a belief in the idea that art and interior design, too often treated as distinct disciplines, should be inseparable. Ten years on, the magazine has proven its thesis handsomely.
That same ethos defines the house, but over time the interiors had begun to feel ripe for reimagining—with new textures, new colors. One key inspiration came during Cohen’s visit a few years ago to the Kips Bay Decorator Show House in Palm Beach, Florida, where she found herself immediately captivated by a blue family room with a visually arresting Pierre Frey textile and pops of sunny yellow.
“My mother loved yellow,” she says. “I grew up in a house with yellow shutters, a yellow kitchen, and yellow-and-white-striped awnings. It shaped my taste and my outlook. It’s such a happy color.”
The room, it turned out, was the work of Scott Sanders, a designer Cohen had known for years who appeared in Galerie’s pages early on. A subsequent visit to the designer’s East Hampton home convinced her that he was the perfect partner to bring that same warmth and energy to her house.
Their collaboration kicked off with a scheme for the family room that revolved around the spirited Pierre Frey fabric Cohen had admired, its geometric pattern evocative of early modern abstract painting. “It has such a rich combination of colors and a beautiful graphic print that feels like the movement of waves,” says Sanders, who used it on the cushions of two sets of vintage bamboo-and-rattan chairs. “It became the muse for the space.”
The fabric’s chromatic swirls play off a pair of lively Keith Haring floral silkscreens that sing against the room’s sage-hued grass cloth wall covering. (Sanders and Cohen share the view that art need not live on a white wall.) Adding to the lively palette is a custom-designed, L-shaped sofa whose upholstery provides one of the home’s splashes of beloved yellow, matched by the stripes of the rug below. “Before, the house felt a little austere,” Cohen says. “The color, the rattan, the bamboo, and the wicker really warmed things up.”
Invigorating yellow accents also turn up in the living room. Here, Sanders chose another graphic upholstery, rendered in vivid flowers, as the hero fabric for two lounge chairs he intended to position near the entrance hall. But Cohen insisted they belonged at the room’s far end, where their exuberance would be revealed gradually, allowing quieter woven-rope chairs by John Himmel Decorative Arts to greet people as they enter.
“She was right,” Sanders concedes. “You want to see the woven first and then, as the
room unfolds, you see the floral. It just radiates joy.”
Then there is the art. Cohen came to collecting some 15 years ago, beginning as many do with the reassurance of established names such as Jennifer Bartlett and Roy Lichtenstein, whose works preside over the sunny breakfast room sitting area. Collecting, Cohen states, is a discipline that matures. Blue-chip acquisitions offer their satisfactions, but increasingly she finds greater pleasure in choosing less established artists on instinct, such as Agnès Sandahl, a French ceramist who created the pair of black-and-white paintings that hang in the dining room.
“Trust yourself and have fun with the art,” Cohen says. “Learn about the artist, where they come from, what they’ve done, and then the right piece will speak to you. The more you know, the more you will mature and evolve as a collector.”
Throughout, art plays an animating role. An Alexander Calder lithograph purchased early in the Cohens’ marriage hangs in James’s office, placed in playful dialogue with the room’s orange-striped carpet. In the front staircase, Rob Wynne created a wavelike installation with sweeps of colored, mirrored glass that shifts with the changing light. And in the living room, a wall-spanning Sam Francis work, painted in 1957, the year he first traveled to Japan, exudes an expansive Zen quietude and lightness.
That canvas speaks to the spirit of the house, where interior refinement meets a glorious seaside setting, where art and design are in stylish, thoughtful balance. A place, in other words, for living artfully.
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Summer Issue under the headline “Fresh Perspective.” Subscribe to the magazine.