Residential · Two Trees Lane, Bridgehampton, NY

Cathedral ceilings, glass on three sides, and four mirrored closets.

The brief

The house was finished by the time I got there, and it was beautiful. Robert Stilin had tied the whole thing together and every room in it was resolved. The room they gave me for the gym was the only blank slate in the place. One complete unknown sitting in the middle of all that.

So the job was not just to build a good gym. It was to build a good gym that could stand next to the rest of that house without looking like the room where the exercise equipment went. They cared about how it looked as much as how it worked, which is not how this usually goes.

It was a lot of pressure. I wanted to do them proud.

It was also the first one, and I did it with friends. The whole thing had a casual feel because of that, and it is the thing I have tried hardest to keep with everyone since. Not a vendor turning up with a proposal. A workout partner helping you build a great room in your house.

Location

Bridgehampton, NY

A blank room in a finished house.

The Two Trees Lane room before the gym was built, an empty second-floor space with a vaulted ceiling

Before · the only unresolved room in a finished house

The Two Trees Lane gym during install, kettlebells and mats on the floor before anything was mounted

During · everything on the floor, nothing installed

Rogue power rack on the dark gable end wall of the Two Trees Lane home gym in Bridgehampton

After · the rack on the gable end

How it gets used

It is their favorite room in the house.

That is their line, not ours.

The gym gets used every day, often more than once, by more than one person. They run group sessions in it. It has become a real amenity when they have guests. And Cisco still coaches David in that room weekly, sometimes more than that, on video from New York.

A room either gets used or it does not. That is the only measure of this work worth trusting, and it is the one nobody else reports.

The solve

What went in, and why.

One of them wanted neutral-grip pull-ups. Not a nice-to-have. The thing he actually trains.

The obvious answer was to hang a bar from the vaulted ceiling, out in the open part of the room. We wanted to do it that way. The problem is that no bar exists that mounts like that and gives you a real neutral grip. We looked.

So we did it the other way round. Standard bar on the rack, then we built onto the side of it until it became something you cannot buy: two close neutral grips, a wide neutral grip, and the standard bar still there for everything else. One structure, four ways to pull.

That is most of this job. Somebody tells you what they want to be able to do, the catalogue does not have it, and you make it out of parts.

The install