Step Inside a Zen Modernist Home That Brims with Art and Design

ExhibitionStep Inside a Zen Modernist Home That Brims with Art and DesignLisa Perry prepares to open Long Island’s Onna House to the public

By Alia Akkam

April 27, 2022

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The exterior of Onna House. Photo: Courtesy of Onna House

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When designer and curator Lisa Perry heads to the office from her home on Long Island’s East End, she drives some 20 minutes to Onna House, the Zen modernist home originally built for the well-known Pop Art collectors Robert and Ethel Scull, in 1962. There, at the home she overhauled with Brooklyn-based practice Harper Design + Build, she is surrounded by works of art and design objects, all of which flaunt the imprint of female talents—think a multimedia book installation seemingly plucked from a vintage library by Julie Wolfe, Kelly Behun’s sleek, ebonized, ash and cast metal table, and geometry-patterned glazed ceramics from Sabra Moon Elliot. As of May 28, the public is invited to tour Onna House on a by appointment basis and to see Perry’s personal collection up close.

With its East Hampton residential location, Onna House, a steel and glass landmark courtesy of the late architect Paul Lester Wiener, is not a traditional gallery. Rather, it’s an intimate gallery-like experience presented in a “fresh, new way,” Perry told AD PRO. It is also an organic outgrowth of her own thoughtfully assembled collection of artworks that are unavailable for purchase by visitors. “It was important for me to first go to every single one of these artists and say, ‘I believe in your work, so I’m buying your work, and I’m going to start collecting your work, and one day we will have a show of more of your work.’”

Inside the modernist gem, artworks and examples of design cohabitate. 

Photo: Courtesy of Onna House

There is hope that, eventually, artists from all disciplines will come to roost at Onna House, sleeping in the guesthouse during residencies or making collaborative works with fellow creators for a day amid the natural landscape. Each of the bedrooms in the home were intentionally transformed to accommodate communal spaces. After all, Onna House is meant to serve as a collective, “a studio to meet and hang out with people,” as Perry puts it.

Kicking off the Onna House events calendar and running through June 25 is “Listening to the Thread,” an exhibition of dreamy, woven tapestries by Kyoto-bred Mitsuko Asakura, complemented by jewelry, mirrors, and contemplative paper dresses from multidisciplinary Geneva artist Ligia Dias. “This is the first gallery show I’ve ever done in my life,” Perry points out.

But it’s an undertaking that Fabienne Stephan of the New York gallery Salon 94, who introduced Perry to Asakura, believes that Perry is well equipped for. “Lisa has always been drawn to emerging and established female artists, and Onna House will be alive with new works by them,” she says. These artists curated by Perry all have compelling points of view. Take Asakura’s, which Stephan has described as “fragile.” The curator and gallery director adds, “There is a vulnerability to them. They are fine and translucent, and look like they are breathing.”

The pool and the verdant grounds, are another attraction.

Photo: Courtesy of Onna HouseBecome an AD PRO Member

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A daring, unconventional approach is also what attracted Perry to the modernist home. She was raised a half hour outside of Chicago in a striking home designed by architect George Frederick Keck. Its close resemblance to Onna House was in fact “eerie,” notes Perry, who adds that Keck was inspired by both the Bauhaus and the architecture of Japan. “The whole house had shoji screens; there were no doors. It was an incredible way to grow up.” As a nod to the Japanese aesthetic that shaped her childhood, Perry also revived Onna House’s primary bath with an open shower, a steel and marble custom vanity, and more of those earthy shoji screens.

Raised in a family that worked in home textiles, Perry says memories of her dad “painting in the basement” and her mom “off at her art gallery, with the fabrics all around us,” instilled a love for art and design that ultimately sparked Onna House. “This feels like I am continuing my culturally rich upbringing. It gets me back to my roots.” Likewise, her parents, “were politically active and kind of hippies,” Perry says. “My mother and sister were feminists, and then I got involved helping women get elected to political office and working for Hillary Clinton,” she adds. So the fact that Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan were among the guests of the former Onna House resonated with her. “There are so many fantastic tie-ins. Onna House embodies everything I care about,” Perry says.