About

Working with a modern design or toiling with a deep commitment to sensitive historic restoration and preservation, Strada Baxter Design/Build meets the needs of the most meticulous architects or owners.  From their cutting edge aesthetics to reconstruction and preservation track record, this remarkable partnership is dedicated to designing, building and preserving homes across the full spectrum of our unique East End.

Robert Strada, after a rewarding industrial design career in SoHo, took a commission from Princeton University in 2000 to design the restoration of the university-owned 1935 Garden Theater.  He was hooked.  Strada then created a lecture series, "The Artist as a Working Man" presented at Princeton over three semesters before focusing on his work on the East End.  Here, ironically, he quickly found himself responsible for saving one of the oldest buildings in Early American history, deconstructing and labeling it piece by piece. He has since built a strong reputation for historic preservation, adaptive reuse, conversion and solving unique challenges.

These two creative men -- Strada with an industrial design background, who designed and installed Brioni's global network of retail stores and had his own personal line of furniture produced by Italy's Cassina, and Baxter, a marine botanist by training, a builder and preservationist by occupation, formed their design and building firm Strada Baxter Design/Build, LLC, in 2011.

Friends for more than a decade, the two men started with a one-time joint venture in 2010 to bid on the restoration of the Nathaniel Rogers House for the Town of Southampton. While their bid was second lowest and ultimately unsuccessful, that collaboration and shared passion for restoration and fine workmanship, led to the formation of Strada Baxter Design/Build, LLC, the following year.

The initial partnership concentrated on the highly meticulous and satisfying preservation and restoration work from our early history, including the Blacksmith Shop and the Captain Isaac Sayre barn at the Southampton Historical Museum, the mule barn on Gardiner's Island, the Smith-Taylor Cabin on Shelter Island, the Topping Rose Inn and Barn in Bridgehampton, the Isaac Osborn House on Newtown Lane in the Village of East Hampton and the 1747 Baker House for the Town of East Hampton.

Richard Ward Baxter, who traces his East End roots back to the 1640's, a member of the Howell family whose ancestor was a founder of Southampton, was raised on the Great South Bay.  During the height of the COVID epidemic Dick retired in July 2020.