Town & Country: Special Home Issue (June 2001)  

“Building on the Past” 

In the Hamptons, a single-style-the Shingle style- once again dominates the architectural landscape. Who’s designing these major traditional houses? And whatever happened to modernism? 

            If the Hamptons are still hotter-than-thou, their architecture is not. “Traditional,” says Peter Hallock, president of the East End real-estate agency Allan M. Schneider Associates, Inc., when asked about the trend in houses today. “Traditional,” says Michael Braverman, a long-time local realtor now working as a consultant. “Traditional,” says Francis Fleetwood, a local architect with a long string of houses behind and ahead of him.

            Despite recent questions about the nation’s economic stability, ever-pricier houses continue to be built and purchased in the Hamptons, and the vast majority are traditional in style. The average sale price for a house in the area increased by 42 percent in 2000 over 1999 prices, according to the brokerage firm Cook Pony Farm Real Estate, and the top house price last year was $32 million- paid, as it happens, by Jerry Seinfield for Billy Joel’s French-style villa in East Hampton. As of this writing, a Shingle-style house, designed by Francis Fleetwood on a 25-acre site jutting into Georgica Pond, is listed at a record-setting $50 million. Even undistinguished, speculatively built houses on relatively small lots, grouped in subdivisions that you might mistake for a Dallas suburb, can go for several million.

            Surely many of the vacationers who seek to buy or build, being wealthy, individualistic New Yorkers, possess an independence of spirit and a taste for innovative architecture, right?

            In truth, while a few residents over the years have been arty and experimental-remember Jackson Pollock?- most have tended to be quite conservative. Architecturally speaking, this has meant that the American-colonial style has been revived over and over again, repackaged in the late 19^th century as the Shingle style and resuscitated again in the late 20^th century as the pervasive “traditional” style. What lies behind this centuries-old love affair?

            “People want houses that give them the feeling of having roots,” says Fleetwood, who arrived to practice in the Hamptons in 1980 and noticed, by mid-decade, that most people were choosing to build updated Shingle-style houses over modernist ones. “Also, they want to surround themselves with a bric-a-brac, which modern architecture doesn’t hold gracefully.” Fleetwood loves the variety that the Shingle style can accommodate. He and his partners, Jim McMullan and Robert Lenahan, have experimented, for example, with a variety of shingled roof shapes, from an elegant flared version to a far heavier, thatchlike one.

            The very bigness of a contemporary Shingle-style house may be imposing, but its features, while impressive in their variety, are charming rather than pretentious. As you approach such a house, its sculptural quality engages your eye, from the dominant, all-embracing roof to the shady inset porches and many setbacks, and its decidedly asymmetrical form projects a sense of informality. Inside, this casual, rambling nature continues in the arrangement of the rooms. There are no classical axes about which the spaces must be organized and no strict building perimeter to restrain their shapes; you feel that the needs of the family have molded the house, not vice versa. Natural materials tend to be used, preferably simple ones, such as wood and tile, rather than grand ones, like marble. “The interior of my house is very quiet and serene in feeling,” says a Hamptons client of architect Jacquelin T. Robertson’s. “It seems to have a calming effect on people. I believe this is due to great discipline and control in the elements of the interior architecture.” Indeed, in the best of these traditional houses, the architects have organized all the parts within a deliberate geometry. Carefully studied proportions and continuous surfaces unify the seemingly random exterior forms, and patterns- linear, two-dimensional and spatial- create internal harmony.

            It was just this combination of spontaneity and control that governed the first Shingle-style designs. Developed with a bang elsewhere, they arrived characteristically late in the Hampton, toward the end of the 119^th century. The bang had occurred, notably in New England, by the 1880s, when gutsy, newly wealthy industrialists crossed paths with a set of restless young architects, Stanford White and Henry Hobson Richardson among them. Together they invented a new American Shingled colonial saltbox, but brilliantly extended. Asymmetrically arranged wings reminiscent of English medieval houses were added, and wide, Japanese-style roofs pulled the composition together. In the Hamptons villages, where the first vacationers had followed the conservative colonial style initiated by early settlers, the Shingle style was introduced once it had become accepted elsewhere, and was soon joined by an eclectic mix of European-influenced styles.

            Modern architecture began appearing in the Hamptons in the late 1930s, and then again in the late 1940s and the following decades. Originating in Europe before World War I, it was a way of expressing, by the elimination of tacked-on decoration, both the overturn of the class-based social system and the efficiency of modern technologies. Admittedly, in the Hamptons as elsewhere in America, the radical social program of modernism was largely overlooked, while the novelty of its forms predominated. For some time, it became the quintessential beach-house style: compact, unfussy, inexpensive. In the 1960s, several young New York architects strove to elaborate upon Le Corbusier’s early ideas about form and space. Notable were Charles Gwathmey, who built his parents’ combination house/ studio in Amagansett, and Richard Meier, who designed the startlingly white Saltzman and Hoffman houses in East Hampton. While not large, these houses proved to be significant because they freed architecture from a too-strict interpretation of the “form follows function” dictum.

            In the late 1970s and early 1980s, cheaply built, decidedly unsubtle versions of modern architecture began proliferating in the area, and Hamptons residents turned once again to the Shingle style was back to being done straight, transforming owners instantly- or so they felt- into landed gentry. Today the new home-seekers are, in a way, more sophisticated than ever and know exactly what they want.

            Many are aware of certain advantages in building a traditional-style house from scratch. “I felt the interior spaces of my house should be open and light-filled so that they would connect with the beauty of their surroundings,” says Robertson’s East End client. “The antecedent houses did not always do that.” He and others appreciate the higher ceilings and larger windows of the new traditionals, as well as several alterations to traditional layouts that suit contemporary ways of living.

            “Our kitchen is one of the biggest rooms in the house, and we spend all our time there,” says Bettina Schoenbach, a German fashion designer who is a recent client of Frank Greenwald’s. “The house very much matches my design philosophy- to combine the traditional with the modern.” One Hamptons homeowner, who has now built her second Francis Fleetwood house, says. “Today we can accommodate our grown and their children. We want our privacy, and they want enough bathrooms. No older home could provide for our needs.”

            It’s a fact of life that what most people want, in the Hamptons, as elsewhere, is what others have. With architecture, this may reflect not only a lack of imagination or a drive to keep up with the Joneses, but also a move to make eventual resale simple and profitable. Because many people are investing so much in their houses, their wealth seems not to be freeing them, but rather tying them to the bottom line.

            After all, the new traditional-style custom house is not inexpensive. For $350 per square foot, you can have an architect-designed house with standard cedar shingles and good catalog windows.  Specially designed brass hardware and custom-made windows and doors may bring the price to $450 per square foot, or #3.6 million (not counting land costs) for an 8,000 square foot house- and that may be just the start. Other special details can include hand-split, patterned or steam-bent cedar shingles, heated stone floors, elaborate paneling and cabinets, and so on. “The sky’s the limit,” admits Frank Greenwald, who regularly flies to Europe to select special items for clients, such as millwork and French limestone for floors. Greenwald moved to East Hampton about thirteen years ago, first opening an office for New York architect Peter Marino and starting his own practice in 1992. He attracts, he says, people looking for low-key, high-end traditional houses; how “low-key” is defined in the Hamptons is anyone’s guess.

            “You can show off your money so much better in the Hamptons than on Sutton Place,” quips architecture critic Alastair Gordon, author of the new book Weekend Utopia: Modern Living in the Hamptons (Princeton Architectural Press). Admittedly, the much-derided neoclassical house that Manhattan-based industrialist Ira Rennert is now building on oceanfront farmland in Sagaponack is an anomaly: its reported 66,000 square feet, with outbuildings bringing the total property to more than 100,000 square feet, have neighbors worrying about their water views. Still, “big” is getting bigger. Eight thousand square feet is “average high end,” says realtor Hallock; 20,000 square feet is not extraordinary. Most people want a great room, sitting rooms for master and guest suites, 600-sqaure-foot kitchens, screening rooms, home gyms and billiard rooms, an elevator and his and her home offices. They “need” the space for their extended families, as well as to accommodate friends invited out to admire the spread.

            It hasn’t taken long for such spreads to become a sprawl. One element of the Hamptons’ residential tradition that can’t be recaptured is the open farmland that used to extend as far as the eye could see. Among those who speak with nostalgia about the way the Hamptons used to be, few express themselves as wistfully as builder/developer Jeffrey Colle. “When I arrived here more than twenty-five years ago, the fields stretched all the way to the dunes. It was beautiful. Wherever you stood along the ocean, you saw not more than five or six houses.” He admits to being part of the problem. “But I build no more than three houses a year, and I deliver quality,” he explains by way of justification.

            To maintain a modicum of open land, the towns require a certain percentage of subdivided land to be set aside as undeveloped agricultural reserves. Furthermore, Southampton’s community preservation fund, for one, has enabled the town to buy environmentally sensitive properties. Still, speculative houses have been popping up at a furious rate. It is estimated that now only 31 percent of Southampton’s land is undeveloped, versus 73 percent in 1960. Moratoriums in 1999, temporarily halting permits for large subdivisions in East Hampton and Southampton, ended before the towns had come up with satisfactory long-term plans.

            Fortunately, some landowners are making provisions for maintaining some of their holdings in an undeveloped state. Business executive Ronald Lauder is one who has been putting aside land reserves in East Hampton; Wall Street financier Louis Moore Bacon has given up most of his development rights in perpetuity on more than a thousand east end acres. Such private moves, plus whatever protection of land the towns and region can provide, are absolutely essential if any rural character in the Hamptons is to be retained.

            Among the keepers of the flame- following the spirit as well as the fundamental rules of the Hamptons’ traditional architecture- is Jacquelin T. Robertson. Since becoming a pert-time East Hampton dweller almost forty years ago, Robertson has designed numerous houses in the area, even as he carries out larger commissions with his firm, Cooper, Robertson & Partners of New York. A former dean of the University of Virginia School of Architecture, he absorbed the lessons of traditional building in his native Virginia and has studied them closely ever since. “I find the gene system of American architecture fascinating,” says Robertson. “It is a cross-breeding of European styles- Dutch, English, French, Spanish- and was first executed by builders using pattern books, who introduced mistranslations and a quirkiness that I love.” To become a really good tradition architect, says Robertson, you must be willing to undergo a thorough training in historical styles. “You can only break the rules if you understand the language.”

            Over the past decade, the quality of locally built, architect-designed Shingle-style houses has generally been improving. Robertson and Robert A.M. Stern are knowledgeable about the style’s history and formal variations. Local architects Frank Greenwald, Peter Cook and Francis Fleetwood, as well as Shope Reno Wharton Associates of Connecticut and Peter Marino of New York, have also designed fine houses in the style for Hamptons sites.

            “At its best, Shingle-style architecture, with its porches and imaginative rooflines, projects the very romance that people come here for,” says Cook, whose office is in the former Southampton weigh station. “It’s very malleable and can incorporate those little offbeat details- like a small door under the stairs, or a turret- that you might remember from your childhood. Its tried-and-true forms offer people a sense of security, a feeling of peace and quiet, and this is what they need in their otherwise busy lives.”

            But over time, thoughtless conformity to a single style can induce a deadening of the spirit. It has all too often rendered acceptable a set of meaningless, ill-proportioned “traditional” details, slapped onto spec houses built to minimum standards. As long as they contain every luxury, these houses command seven-figure prices.

            But will this continue to be so? “The trend will swing back toward nontraditional houses,” believes Greenwald, who for one would like the opportunity to design in the modern idiom for a change. Of late, a number of exceptional architects have built modern-style houses in the Hamptons, among them New Yorkers Rafael Vinoly; Tod Williams/Billie Tsien Architects; and Peter Stamberg and Paul Aferiat. The latter believe that “modern is the Hamptons,” and that simple, clean forms, like those used for Mediterranean houses, are ideally adapted to the seaside. Meanwhile, thirty-somethings are snapping up and restoring the few remaining modernist houses of quality dating from the 1950s , ‘60s, and ‘70s: minimalist retreats by Julian and Barbara Neski, among others, that are “about getting back to nature and simplifying life,” as Alastair Gordon has written.

            One the one hand, modern architecture can by now be considered traditional. On the other, any traditional style can be adapted inventively. But innovation can be more than thoughtful adaption. It can be- as both the modern and Shingle styles were at their inception- and inspired reflection of contemporary civilization. Why not in the Hamptons? 

By Susan Doubilet. Photographs by Maura McEvoy.