Asia Baker Stokes’s forebears had many mansions—or, at least, they were responsible for multiple suave residences that are revered by architecture scholars. The most famous is an elegant Neo-Federal on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which George F. Baker Jr., her banker great-grandfather, famously expanded with Delano and Aldrich, the inventive high-society firm that was beloved by plutocrats of a most refined stripe in the early 20th century—though Palm Beach’s legendary Amado (AD, November 2014), an Addison Mizner palazzo created for another great-grandfather, is no slouch. That being said, Baker Stokes’s own home is arguably the most charming ever to come into the family’s orbit: a 1930s former stable on Long Island’s tony North Shore. Unlike her ancestors, she cheerfully admits that she had little to do with it other than oversee some light renovations inside and out and then outfit its sunny rooms in a winning combination of refreshed vintage furnishings, works of art with family connections (among them a Luca Papaluca watercolor of Viking, the Bakers’ 1909 steam yacht), and sturdy yet stylish custom-made pieces that can stand up to her and husband Ben Stokes’s two lively young daughters, Ava and Georgia.
The living-room windows and sofa are clad in Le Gracieux fabrics, a Scalamandré velvet dresses the spoonback chair, and
a Penny Morrison print is on the chaise longue. Behind the hydrangeas hangs an Alejo Vidal-Quadras portrait of Baker Stokes’s grandmother Frances Munn Baker.
“Mark Badgley and James Mischka did a complete overhaul when they lived here,” Baker Stokes says, referring to a fashion-world couple admired as much for their serial homeownership as for their dresses and accessories. Curiously, Baker Stokes and her husband, a real-estate developer, had seen the two-story building, crowned by a perky cupola, years before they married, back when they were living in Manhattan. “It was a magical, forlorn mess, but you could see its potential,” she recalls. They came across it while “house snooping” in the area, where she had summered since childhood and which was her late father’s scholarly stomping grounds. (Anthony K. Baker was an author of the seminal Long Island Country Houses and Their Architects, 1860–1940.) Still, they weren’t ready to take on a project, so it became the house that got away—until it came on the market again in 2014, a year after their wedding. It had been copper-guttered and smartly kitchened by Badgley and Mischka, and the newlyweds were expecting their first child, Ava. What better place to start a family than the house that had made them swoon at first sight?
Baker Stokes and her daughters in the double-height living room, which used to incorporate a hayloft and is painted a Farrow & Ball white. Bunny Williams Home sofa upholstered in a Jasper woven, Visual Comfort picture lights, Pierre Frey fabric lampshades, Casamidy cocktail table, and Fibreworks carpet.
Isabel Parra
The entrance hall, with the living room in the distance.
Isabel ParraAbout eight months of tweaking followed before the family could move in. Baker Stokes expanded where possible, such as deepening the long glazed entrance hall from a mere corridor that linked one end of the I-shaped house to the other into a more generous passage. Since the main bedroom’s new balcony blocked the sun from reaching a ground-floor bath, Baker Stokes and architect Austen T. Gray converted the latter space into a paneled den with a fireplace, which she describes as “a cozy dark space to retreat, watch movies, drink wine, and listen to music.”
Every room in the house, several of them white-walled and as crisp as a seashell, actually feels the same way: casual, gathered, dégagé. The living-room sofa is flanked by consignment-shop Louis XV–style tables that Baker Stokes painted blue and then had gilded by an artisan. A large Delacroix-style equestrian painting created by a boarding-school friend of Baker Stokes’s father is mounted on a wall-spanning bookcase. A terrifically chic Alejo Vidal-Quadras sketch of one of Baker Stokes’s grandmothers hangs beneath a watercolor of a long-ago family yacht, not far from an oil portrait of a grandly side-whiskered great-great-grandfather.
“The histories of objects and the stories of how you repurposed them bring a lot of feeling into a room,” Baker Stokes explains. “It’s important for your spaces not to feel like a showroom.” Or to behave like one. The sturdy Asian coffee table in the family room makes a perfect platform for Georgia and Ava to catapult onto the big gingham-check sofa, and there’s always art residue. “Georgia loves to paint, and I don’t want to inhibit that, but it’s so messy,” her mother says, adding that there’s always glitter somewhere. Though Stokes sometimes wishes that the hefty dining table, custom-made by a Polish craftsman in Brooklyn and joined by two types of chairs (raw Chippendale style, rugged Charlotte Perriand), were just a trifle narrower, its breadth is perfect for parent-child projects. And scratches be damned. Says Baker Stokes, with a shrug, “It’s a farm table—I wanted fork marks.”
The six-acre property is indisputably a children’s paradise. The walled front garden is all about hydrangeas, boxwood, and butterflies. Out back, off the kitchen, is a potager, not only to fuel the family’s menus but also to delight and inform the younger generation. “It’s such a cool way for them to understand where food comes from,” Baker Stokes says, adding that the pandemic’s restrictions turned husband and wife into gentleman farmers. “We grew a lot of our vegetables, such as peas and carrots, from seed,” she adds, “and the girls ate tomatoes like candy.”
This year, expect more of the same, as well as hikes. Stokes has carved paths that lead to an overgrown meadow and, of all things, an abandoned cast-iron tub and a chain-link fence that mysteriously belts a clutch of conifers. As Baker Stokes dryly observes, “Land-scaping is an ongoing project.” But, as she has known since the start, there’s nothing but potential.
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