I first met Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch of Roman and Williams in Montauk eight years ago; we had just bought our home in neighboring Amagansett, and the area was still new for me. I’ll never forget being invited to their seaside retreat to celebrate the Fourth of July that year. I walked through a narrow pathway lined with wax-covered surfboards under an archway of unkempt, lush greenery punctuated by a twinkle of overhead lights. I could hear the waves crashing on the cliffs just down the road, smell the salt hanging thickly in the air, while the scent of grilled meat filled my nose. This is summer in Montauk—decadent, bohemian, and intoxicating.

This luxuriant mood is elemental in its simplicity, rooted by a kind of modernism not found in the severe white angularity of the city, but rather in the soil, the briny ocean, and the dramatic cycle of the seasons that Stephen and Robin have harnessed in their 1950s Cape Cod home. Simultaneously raw and artfully collected, the house seems deliberately considered yet so disarmingly casual. They like it that way. It allows their minds reprieve to wander.

“That unfinished quality helps your brain evolve in terms of new ideas,” says Robin. “It’s that sense of a laboratory, that everything is sort of always unfinished. There’s always a new experiment; there’s always something new to investigate.” The ceiling is perhaps the best example of this. Upon moving into the house, Stephen immediately punched through the ceiling’s drywall to expose the original unfinished warm wood framing and beams hidden beneath. It was their first design decision, and it speaks to the spirit of all that followed.

Robin and Steven have cultivated a sense of wildness in Montauk, which has become a workshop for their design business. The untamed style of their home inspires their work, and that work then informs their design process at home in a beautiful cycle. Their tambour-clad living and dining room walls are a brilliant example of this symbiosis. They spied the material in André Balazs’ office elevator while working on the Standard. They decided to use it personally and professionally: raw and unfinished in Montauk; glazed like lacquer in the Boom Boom Room. Meanwhile, a dark, enveloping shade of blue, which Robin likens to being inside the belly of a whale, covers their bedroom walls. They found it so peaceful, it eventually inspired the wall color at Guild.

“Montauk is about unfinished things. That quality allows your brain to evolve in terms of new ideas—like a laboratory.”

Elsewhere, gestural collections of objects and artwork fill every surface. In the living room, a wall of densely clustered seascape paintings are hung gallery style; while it may look like a lifelong collection of the genre, it was a design decision that Stephen and Robin made early on and hunted for aggressively, with a strict budget of $150 per piece. The result is deeply evocative of place and mood. In contrast, collections of curios discovered in flea markets, antique stores, and even in nature create tableaux in cabinets and on tabletops. Each collection, in its sheer quantity, proves purposeful and soulful. “I really think everybody needs their own cabinet of curiosity,” opines Robin. In lockstep, Stephen says, “We try to build this into a lot of houses. A shallow cabinet that you can just fill through time. You never finish. You have to let it grow.” Time, permanence, and patina figure powerfully in Robin and Stephen’s approach.

For years, the sole pieces in the reception room were the brass-edged table that hailed from a bygone-era French bank and a gargantuan hippo skull that sat on the far right edge of the table. Even today, these pieces remain like anchors, impervious to change. New objects, textiles, and furniture slowly accumulate around them, but fundamentally, the home’s vision and purpose have stayed the same. “We can build on things, but we don’t like to gut stuff and start over,” Stephen says. “Magical things happen when there’s stability, like seeing something bleach in a window; there’s something so beautiful about that patina. You put something out and just see how it changes.”

This also speaks to their garden, which could be mistaken for a rambling swath of English countryside. “A sense of imagination, I think, comes from a little bit of the unknown and a little bit of the undecided, and that’s certainly gardening,” says Robin. “Planting seeds, then relinquishing control. You could put all the time and love in the world into certain plants in that garden, and nature will take it away.” The lush, slow-lived life they have coerced from this home and the land on which it sits reflects Robin and Stephen’s values. “Find your own kind of sincerity,” advocates Robin, “and love of what you’re creating around you so that you’re layering it and building on it and not changing it.”

“I think as a creative person it’s so essential to remain a little lawless and untamed. A little bit of a wildness in you. It’s critical, and I think Montauk’s allowed us that.”