Later came a summer in Bridgehampton, and another in Southampton, at a rented cottage belonging to Roy Lichtenstein. “What I liked was the connection with art,” Duong says. “People always talk about the incredible light, but it’s true. You see things differently out here.” After Schnabel and other romances— and after becoming a fixture on New York’s art and fashion scenes—she fell in love with Barton Hubbard Quillen, who at the time owned the Brooklyn furniture shop Prague Kolektiv, now closed. It was Quillen who took her to see an old fisherman’s house that was for sale in East Hampton, not far from where both Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning had once lived.
Built in 1887, the 1,800-square-foot dwelling was humble, but it had withstood hurricanes, its bead-board walls were solid, and it offered views of the bay in winter, when the trees are bare. Though some improvements had been made—namely the kitchen was upgraded and a bathroom installed (to replace the outdoor latrine) in 1940—Duong notes that “nobody had done the ugly ’70s renovation.”
She wound up buying the place and marrying Quillen. Though they split after a couple of years, Duong decided to keep the house. She turned to her friend Daniel Romualdez, an architect, for advice on what to do with it. He suggested simply moving the staircase, which bisected the living room, to open up the space—and pretty much leaving everything else alone. “I’m like, ‘Really? Try harder!’” she recalls with a laugh, standing in her cornflower-blue kitchen. So Romualdez drew up a more extensive plan. But Duong opted to wait another year before starting renovations, during which time she recognized he had been right all along.
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