LongHouse Reserve

LongHouse Reserve is a 16-acre integrated environment created by artist, collector, and world-renowned textile designer and weaver Jack Lenor Larsen (1927-2020). LongHouse serves the community with vast open space and programs in art, nature, and wellness, providing sanctuary for Long Island and beyond. The sculpture garden features more than 60 outdoor works, including permanent collection works by Buckminster Fuller, Dale Chihuly, Yoko Ono, Willem de Kooning, and Sui Jinguao, and seasonal loans from artists such as Wyatt Kahn and Maren Hassinger, among others.

These works and the setting encourage exploration and contemplation for new and repeat visitors alike. LongHouse Reserve inspires and empowers visitors of all ages to see and think in new ways, and to incorporate art and design into their lives, invoking an ongoing act of creation that is renewed by the diverse communities drawn to its values and purpose. Whether visitors return to see a favorite garden or walk the grounds in search of a new installation, Longhouse is always changing and always new.

Jack Lenor Larsen designed and built LongHouse as a case study to exemplify a creative approach to contemporary life. He believed visitors experiencing art in living spaces have a unique learning experience.

When he acquired the property in 1975, Larsen began to lay out an entrance drive lined with majestic cryptomerias, established lawns and ornamental borders, and defined major spaces as settings for plant collections and sculpture. 

The long, low berms that divide the property recall the boundaries of farm fields that occupied the site until it was abandoned for agricultural use in the 19th century. Much of the deciduous canopy of second growth native trees has been preserved. The gardens present the designed landscape as an art form, demonstrate planting potentials in this climate with a wide variety of natural and cultivated species, and offer a diversity of sites for the sculpture installations. 

Finding inspiration in the 7th-century Shinto shrine at Ise, Japan, Larsen decided to build the house on the property in 1986. LongHouse was designed by Larsen in collaboration with architect Charles Forberg and built by Joe Tufariello.