An Old-Fashioned Fixer-Upper

It started, as real-estate adventures often do, with a pragmatic plan. Interior designer David Nastasi and his husband, Michael Stone, had outgrown their Brooklyn Heights apartment and had it with the commute to their East Hampton country house. So they started to look for something in between. “We were really only toying with the idea of moving to the ‘dreaded suburbs,’” the couple says. “We really wanted a fixer-upper,” Nastasi says. “Something I kept calling a ‘time-capsule house.’” They looked at around 20 contestants, but they were either too forlorn, too big, or both; then they spied a photo of the exterior of an impressive Colonial. After one step inside, they were sold. That was in 2014. In 2015, Nastasi and his business partner, Kate Vail, along with a contractor it took them some time to find, got to work. The delicate task at hand: Renovating while keeping the graceful character of the traditional architecture intact.