Rabo’s East Hampton house

Rabo’s East Hampton house is both an inherited family estate and a measure of the distance between material abundance and human connection. Edith Taft leaves Rabo a nineteen-room waterfront home that had belonged to her Cincinnati family for three generations; after her death, it shelters his celebrated private collection, but its courts, beach, and rooms cannot make a family out of the people who live there. The house’s changing appearance—from Edith’s carefully modernized art-filled foyer to a rose-patterned surprise—makes domestic space a record of competing histories and expectations.

Inheritance and scale

The house stands on the waterfront in East Hampton, Long Island, and Edith leaves it to Rabo after their twenty-year marriage. It had been in her Anglo-Saxon family for three generations, a lineage that, Rabo observes, could hardly have anticipated that the property would pass to a man whose name seemed exotic to them. He imagines the family’s ghosts maintaining Episcopalian good manners, then answers their hypothetical claim that he has no right to the house by invoking the Statue of Liberty. The inheritance thus carries a tension between old family possession and the immigrant’s claim to America, with Rabo framing his place in the house not as an exploit but as a right.

The estate’s physical scale dwarfs the small family living in it. It has two tennis courts, a swimming pool, a carriage house, a potato barn, and three hundred yards of private beach on the Atlantic. The house also contains an improbable dwelling invisible from the main house. Its abundance makes the household’s smallness unmistakable: Edith had no children with her first husband and was past childbearing when she married Rabo, whose two sons, Terry and Henri, eventually have children of their own but no longer speak to him.

A home emptied by loss

After Edith dies, the house loses the people and routines that had made it feel inhabited. The servants leave soon afterward, explaining that the place has become too lonely. Rabo hires replacements at considerable expense, but the arrangement is reduced: the cook, a divorced East Hampton native of about forty, lives in the servants’ quarters on the third floor of the ell with her fifteen-year-old daughter, Celeste. Celeste does not work for Rabo; she lives in the house, eats his food, and hosts her friends on the tennis courts, in the pool, and along the private shore.

Celeste and her friends ignore Rabo, treating him as though he were a senile veteran left to watch a museum. The image is close to Rabo’s own account of what he has become. His sons are estranged, and the surviving members of his other chosen family, the Abstract Expressionists, no longer speak to him. The house is therefore not simply an affluent setting: its scale gives physical form to the loneliness that remains after the family and artistic community have withdrawn.

Collection and domestic design

The house also functions as a setting for Rabo’s collection of Abstract Expressionist paintings, which he owned before marrying Edith. He insists that their value, alongside the property and other assets she left him, prevents him from being dismissed as a fortune-hunter. He calls himself a poor painter but an exceptional collector, while the pictures’ refusal to depict anything beyond themselves becomes the answer he gives visitors who ask what they are supposed to mean. The house turns private ownership into public encounter: Rabo is its resident, but also the guard expected to explain the art.

Edith is responsible for making that encounter possible. When Rabo moved in from his potato barn, he told her he loved the old-fashioned house as it was and that she need not change it for him. She instead called in contractors, removed the wallpaper and chandeliers, and had the woodwork and walls painted oyster white, with track lighting installed. After the remodeling, Edith recognized her own talent for decorating and arranged for the paintings, long held in storage, to be brought into the house. A 1981 magazine feature described the foyer as a small museum’s potential permanent collection, only the introduction to the art in the rooms beyond. Edith’s work made the Taft family home a gallery without erasing its domestic history.

The foyer and its reversal

The foyer’s significance is sharpened by the contrast between Rabo’s remembered entrance and the one that greets him after a trip to New York City. He expects oyster-white walls and works of art: Terry Kitchen’s painting “Secret Window,” a Matisse showing a woman with a black cat before a wall of yellow roses, and a Hans Hofmann that Terry had given him after Rabo paid for a transmission for Terry’s Buick. These details root the room in a sequence of relationships and exchanges, not just in an inventory of valuable pictures.

Instead, Rabo finds rose-patterned wallpaper, brown trim and doors, and six framed chromos of girls on swings. The sudden change makes him believe, briefly, that he has entered the wrong house; the cook and Celeste arrive first and later tell him he repeated that claim aloud. His homecoming, which the household had anticipated as a surprise party, becomes a confrontation with a space altered beyond recognition. The foyer, once Edith’s solution to the problem of how to display Rabo’s collection in her ancestral home, now registers how vulnerable his sense of home is to changes he did not expect.

Domestic space as memory and identity

The house holds several kinds of inheritance at once: Edith’s family history, her childhood summers and first marriage, her life with Rabo, and the collection he built independently of her wealth. Its rooms can welcome the paintings into daylight, but they cannot restore the people who have departed or repair Rabo’s estrangement from his sons. The contrast between the estate’s private beach and tennis courts and the silence between its occupants makes comfort and loneliness coexist within the same property.

The foyer’s successive designs make that contradiction visible. Edith’s renovation joins an old family house to modern art, turning an inherited interior into a deliberate expression of her taste and Rabo’s collection. The later décor unsettles that arrangement through an equally concrete transformation, rather than through a change in the building itself. As a result, the house is not a stable emblem of wealth or belonging; it is a lived space whose meaning shifts with its occupants, their absences, and the pictures they choose to bring inside.