PHOTOGRAPHS BY JONATHAN BECKER

IÔ t’s the best house in Montauk,” declares Manhattan and Southampton hostess Louise Grunwald: “I love, love, love it.”

“It’s kind of perfect,” agrees J. Crew chairman Mickey Drexler, who for several years owned the former Warhol-Morrissey estate, next door. “Everyone fantasizes about owning that house.”

“It’s completely magical,” says cosmetics heiress and entrepreneur Aerin Lauder. “From the second you turn in to the long winding driveway you feel like you’re in Africa or someplace far away. And then you see the driftwood sign with the name on it and you park your car and you walk down this little stone path through this wild garden that Miranda Brooks designed, and you’re greeted with Bloody Marys and the view of the ocean and dogs running everywhere. I always bring my dogs.”

The “house” they’re all raving about is real ly three shingled saltbox cottages perched on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic about a mile from the Montauk Point Lighthouse, at the eastern tip of Long Island. But to call it a compound, with that word’s connotation of power, status, and wealth, would create a totally false impression. The 17-acre property belongs to the architect and interior designer Daniel Romualdez and his husband, investment banker Michael Meagher, and everything about it reflects the easy, breezy life they enjoy there. In an era of mega-mansions, mega-yachts, and mega-egos, “Fisherman’s Cove,” as the couple named their summertime getaway, offers something different: smallness, simplicity, and discretion.

“The first time I saw it I was walking on the beach,” recalls Mickey Drexler. “And there were these three cottages high up on the cliff and this beautiful, mysterious staircase winding up to them. I thought it was a fantasy place, a storybook place. But so many people can’t appreciate it, especially in the Hamptons, where people are building palaces to themselves, and there’s this competition for bigger and bigger. They walk in and say, ‘Daniel, how can you live in such a tiny space?’ ”

To be precise, the three cottages add up to a mere 1,730 square feet. As Romualdez says jokingly, “That’s smaller than some of my clients’ dressing rooms.” Among his clients, many of whom started out as his friends or became his friends through working together: Deeda Blair, Daphne Guinness, William and Donna Acquavella, Renee and Mark Rockefeller, Gigi and Averell Mortimer, Ralph and Ala Isham, Annette and Matt Lauer, Luke Janklow and Xela Mandel, “Barefoot Contessa” Ina Garten, architecture critic (and Vanity Fair contributing editor) Paul Goldberger, and the late fashion designer L’Wren Scott, who was Mick Jagger’s romantic partner for many years. “L’Wren was one of those who was really sweet. It was a joy to work with her,” says Romualdez, whom she hired to design her New York apartment, which was in a new building. “We ended up doing a lot of work, because Mick thought it was too noisy, sitting in the living room when the cook was in the open kitchen. Every time we had a meeting, Mick would be there, and he would have a very clear point of view—not just about the way things looked but also the way things functioned. L’Wren told me that Mick was very pleased with me, because I met the budget.”

In an era of mega-mansions, “Fisherman’s Cove” offers something different: smallness, simplicity, and discretion.

Romualdez is Aerin Lauder and Eric Zinterhofer’s go-to designer, having worked on their houses in Wainscott and Aspen. The high-style Belperron jewelry salon on Fifth Avenue was designed by Romualdez, as was Lauren Santo Domingo’s Moda Operandi downtown office. He collaborated with Tory Burch to create the sleek signature look of her boutiques, which now number some 200 worldwide. Burch had him update, but not ruin, the 1929 Georgian Revival estate she bought in Southampton in 2009. Two years ago she bought Paul and Bunny Mellon’s luxuriously understated beach house at the Mill Reef Club, on Antigua, and has now hired him to do the same with it. “We are so respectful of Bunny Mellon’s aesthetic,” Romualdez explains, “yet, at the same time, we’re doing a surgical renovation so that it functions as a modern house but people don’t say, ‘Oh, my God, they’ve changed it.’ ”

Romualdez is also currently working on two of the biggest projects of his career, designing the interiors for ultra-luxury condominium towers at 252 East 57th Street, near Sutton Place, and 70 Vestry Street, in Tribeca. The architects on the first are Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; the second brings him back together with his former employer Robert A. M. Stern. “I’ve been very lucky with my clientele in that I get to do a range of work,” he says. “If you look at my portfolio, you’d think I’m sort of schizophrenic. I go from super-minimalist to super-colorful and layered, like Tory’s. I really enjoy working both ways. And I really believe you’re only as good as your client. I’ve learned so much from working with the stylish women that I do.”

His first glamorous patron was Diane von Furstenberg; they were introduced by their artist friend Konstantin Kakanias, and she hired him to do some renovations on her Connecticut country house. He had just gone out on his own after five years at Robert Stern’s architecture firm. He had also briefly worked with Thierry Despont and spent two summers apprenticing to Peter Marino while earning his master’s degree in architecture at Columbia University. “I was the most junior person in Peter’s office,” Romualdez recalls, “but the next thing I knew I was drawing up the ceilings in Valentino’s apartment. Peter was great. He would say, ‘Oh, my God, come to my desk. Oh, my God, Daniel, that is so ugly. Don’t do that to me.’ I knew then already that this guy is the guy … you know, who’s going to be the architect of a generation.”

Daniel Romualdez was not brought up in the Philippines to be an architect or decorator. His father, Benjamin Trinidad Romualdez, was the longtime governor of Leyte Province and the younger brother of First Lady Imelda Marcos. Daniel was sent off to Georgetown Prep, an elite Catholic boys’ boarding school outside Washington, D.C., at 13 years old, and then to Yale. “I was supposed to get an M.B.A. I was studying economics and political science. But there was this one class that all my friends took, which was Vincent Scully’s history of art and architecture. And suddenly, for the first time, I felt like I was struck by lightning. It was the one class that I could be motivated to do all the readings for, and I just aced it.

“My father wasn’t happy about me going to architecture school. And because of that I was sort of the black sheep of the family. Coincidentally, when my father was dying, the [2012] Architectural Digest 100 List came out and I was listed. It was the first time that my father understood what I was doing. Because all his buddies said, ‘Wow, your son is in the AD100. I’ve always had a fancy to hire an AD100 architect.’ He finally understood that I wasn’t a disappointment. It was very sweet. We sort of made up then, and he said, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t more supportive and didn’t do enough. You were on your own for 20 years.’ ”

Romualdez notes that many contemporary architects started out building a house for their parents, including Robert Venturi, Richard Meier, and Charles Gwathmey. “The only thing I did for my parents, pro bono, was my father’s mausoleum. You know, at the end of his life, not the beginning of my career. I’m actually proud of that. It was hard to do it on one’s own. I went to Yale, which was one of the most liberal colleges, and everyone knew who my family was. It was my ambition to walk into a room one day and people wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, there’s the nephew of … ’ or ‘the son of … ’ My ambition was for people to say, ‘There’s Daniel Romualdez, the architect and designer.’

Romualdez credits his five-years-older cousin, Imee Marcos, the eldest daughter of his aunt Imelda, for sparking his interest in interior decorating. “She was a great influence on me as a kid,” he says. “We would be on a yacht in the Philippines and everybody would be water-skiing. And she and I would be tucked away in the airconditioned library, poring through decorating books and magazines. She went to the Shah of Iran’s big party in Persepolis and would describe the tents that Henri Samuel designed for it and show me pictures.” In 1975, while enrolled at Princeton, Imee started dating Fiat heir Lupo Rattazzi, who was studying at Columbia. (Small world: I introduced them, when I was asked to suggest an appropriate young man to be Imee’s date for a dinner Mrs. Marcos was giving at the Plaza hotel for my then boss, Andy Warhol.)

Romualdez says, “Imee would come back from a trip to Italy and tell me, ‘Oh, my God, I went to Gianni Agnelli’s house. You cannot believe the simplicity.’ You know, reminiscing now with you, I realize that everything I saw I saw through the lens of design. I remember Lupo not for anything else but the Denning & Fourcade apartment. That was done for his sisters and him with things from Pier 1, but their mother, Suni, had made it much grander.”

Probably no one had a greater effect on the young Daniel Romualdez than Deeda Blair, whose husband, William McCormick Blair Jr., was President Lyndon B. Johnson’s ambassador to the Philippines from 1964 to 1967; she remains among his closest confidantes to this day. (He consulted on the Blairs’ ethereal apartment in River House when they moved from Washington to New York in 2008.) “I met Deeda when I was seven years old,” he tells me. “I’m sure she doesn’t remember. I was at the Manila International Airport. This black London taxi pulls up, the chauffeur opens the door, and this lady steps out. She seemed to be in an invisible, air-conditioned cone of no heat and no humidity, perfectly fresh, wearing a sleeveless, flowered sheath and white pumps. She was like a movie star. And when I was sent to boarding school near D.C., she was very sweet to regularly invite me to lunch. My uncle was ambassador to Washington, but I wasn’t very close to him. So, I ended up going to Deeda’s for lunch more than to my uncle’s. It felt more simpatico.”

He recalls the advice she gave him upon completing his senior year at Yale and trying to summon up the courage to apply to architecture school in the face of his parents’ adamant opposition. “Deeda said, ‘Daniel, follow your passion. No matter how upset your parents are, if you do well in what you love, they will come around.’ And since she was a friend of my parents’, I felt like it was good advice. When I graduated, she wrote the most unbelievable letters to Philip Johnson and I. M. Pei and arranged for me to meet them, to get advice from them. She got me a job at Thierry Despont’s office. After three months, he said I was too inexperienced.”

Daniel Romualdez Architects opened for business in 1993. His Yale classmate Ralph Isham and his wife, Ala von Auersperg, “were my first big clients. They hired me to do a house in Bridgehampton from the ground up, the first one I ever did. I only did the architecture. Ala had a decorator who I was friendly with, and when the house was finished she told me, ‘Everything you suggested we ended up doing.’ That’s the way I work with people. Instead of having a big ego, you try their way and you suggest your way, and there might be someplace in between. And then the client decides. Maybe it’s being part of a diplomatic family. You just learn to do things through diplomacy, instead of being pushy. You know, the carrot over the stick.” Proof that his diplomacy works: the Ishams commissioned Romualdez to build and decorate their place at the Mill Reef Club, where Ralph is the president.

Romualdez likes to try out new ideas on his own houses—and with four residences in three states, he has plenty of room for what he calls “R&D.” Aside from Montauk, there’s a sumptuous, art-filled Manhattan apartment, a midcentury modernist glass house in Los Angeles, and an old farmhouse in Connecticut that was previously owned by fashion designer Bill Blass. “One of my clients was teasing me about having four houses. She said, ‘How do you do it?’ I told her, ‘Yeah, but all four will fit into one wing of your house.’ ”

Romualdez and Meagher bought their Montauk place in 1996, for $1.8 million. According to local histories, Lathrop Brown, a multi-millionaire Long Island congressman who had been F.D.R.’s classmate at Grot on and roommate at Harvard, acquired property close to the Montauk Point Lighthouse in 1922 and named it Windmill House, after the 1813 windmill he had moved there from Wainscott. Although the three cottages look like 18th-century saltboxes, while renovating them Romualdez found newspapers from the 1930s used as insulation, as well as a photograph from that time showing the three structures attached to the windmill. During World War II, the U.S. Navy absorbed Brown’s property into the adjacent Camp Hero. The windmill was returned to Wainscott, and the cottages were eventually detached and moved to their present location.

“All our friends were laughing at us,” Romualdez remembers. “They said, ‘What? You’re going to live all the way in Montauk? It’s so far.’ They used to joke that we’d have to stop in East Hampton for a break from our long car ride. In the beginning, we used it year-round. We’d spend New Year’s Eve here and have a New Year’s Day party and go hiking with all our friends after lunch. Now we just use it in July and August.”

“We call this the Main House,” Romualdez says as he leads me into the largest of the three cottages, chuckling, because it is barely 1,100 square feet. On the first floor are a living room, dining room, and kitchen; upstairs, there is a bedroom, which was originally reached by an outdoor staircase that “looked like a Hopper painting of a fire escape,” so Romualdez built an indoor one. He decided to keep most of the décor the way he had found it, including the high-gloss mangocolored living-room walls (“which make the room feel sunny even on a rainy day”) and the half-peeling doors hand-painted with floral motifs (“One of Lathrop Brown’s best friends was a French artist and we think he must have painted them”). The furniture is a mix of crisp white sofas and club chairs, a few old Swedish pieces, anonymous early American paintings, chunks of coral that could pass for Urs Fischer sculptures, and lots and lots of seashells. “It real ly is a beach house,” Romualdez explains. “We’re in here in wet bathing suits with wet dogs, coming straight from the beach. And then at night we have a little TV hidden in there and we’ll watch TV.”

The 8-by-10 upstairs bedroom contains built-in bookshelves and storage cabinets, another hidden TV, and a daybed set in a bay window. “It’s a great room to take a nap in in the afternoon,” Romualdez notes. He made the minuscule bathroom feel larger by doing it in all glass. “When I was renovating this place, I really thought of it like a ship,” he says. “You have to use every inch when you have the smallest house in the Hamptons.”

The even smaller guest cottage is basically a bedroom with a big bed that seems to float over the ocean. Romualdez has left the original pine paneling and added an outdoor shower. “It feels like a fisherman’s shack,” he says. “The funniest thing about it is so many of our friends, when they get married, say, ‘Do you mind if we use it for our first night?’ ”

In 1999, his sister, Marean, and her husband, Thomas Pompidou, the grandson of former French president Georges Pompidou, held their civil marriage ceremony there. “So his grandmother Claude Pompidou came with her best friend, Bernadette Chirac,” Romualdez recalls, referring to President Pompidou’s widow and the wife of then French president Jacques Chirac. Upon their arrival, he says, the two grandes dames “went in to look at the house. And I heard them say, ‘Mon dieu, c’est très simple.’ I was so proud of that.”

The cottage Romualdez and Meagher call their own is secluded a few hundred feet down a path lined with bayberry bushes, roses of Sharon, and Montauk daisies. It had two bedrooms, but a few years ago Romualdez, as he puts it, “just blew it out and turned two bedrooms into one that doubles as a media room. A TV pops up from the floor right here, so you can lie here and watch a movie on a rainy day.” The sofas, bed, and chaise are all covered in blue-and-white fabrics; the mother-of-pearl chest of drawers and mirror are from Syria; an antique map of Montauk and a couple of turtle shells hang on the new oak walls. “You can’t put anything of value here,” Romualdez says, “because everything gets destroyed by the salt air.”

His favorite spot to read, rest, and relax is the covered terrace, where a pair of extralarge daybeds face the ocean. “We live here,” he says. “And I cheated: above the bamboo shade I put Plexiglas, so when it’s showering you won’t be stuck inside and get claustrophobic. The one thing about having small houses is you get cabin fever.”

We stroll back to the vine-covered pergola next to the main house, where we are served a perfectly prepared Mediterranean-style lunch on blue-and-white china by a handsome young houseman in white shorts and a blue-andwhite striped pullover. “Daniel always has the most beautiful, delicious lunches,” says Aerin Lauder. “The most incredible turkeyburgers— and I’m not a turkeyburger person—fabulous couscous, spaghetti vongole, homemade apple pie. And there’s always a surprise: he’s always changing things—the napkins, plates, even the position of the table. One day there are flowers; the next time plants in pots, or nothing. He’s not formulaic. He just has this amazing touch for entertaining and for life.”

Adds Mickey Drexler, “There’s no other place you really want to be when you sit there in the pergola having lunch. It’s beyond anything.”

I ask Romualdez if he socializes much with his neighbors, who include Peter Beard, Bruce Weber, Sandy Brant, Julian Schnabel, and Dick Cavett. “What I find with my neighbors is we’re all here for the same reason—to escape the Hamptons,” he replies. “And the people I know among my neighbors are like us—they want to stay home. In Montauk, once you get home, you stay home.”