Click on image to view full PDF
If you peek around the hedges at the sprawling shingle mansions of the Hamptons, you might think that it has always been this way—and will always be this way. You’d be wrong on both counts. The style and the size of homes have shifted significantly with the generations. And as for the future, the corpulent homes of today might very well be the white elephants of tomorrow. (I realize merely stating this is reasonable cause for banishment from anyplace east of the Shinnecock Canal. But before I’m condemned, let’s look at history.)
The first English settlers in Eastern Long Island (Native Americans were already here of course) in the mid-1600s did not get off the boat and take title to group of center hall Colonial houses around a village green. After journeying from England to Massachusetts, and then crossing Long Island Sound, they lived in quite primitive quarters—huts or dugouts or teepees—until they could construct slightly less primitive wood framed houses.
The original version of the Colonial style developed in the richer urban areas of Boston and Philadelphia and New York, and it was only a relatively few residents who could afford such houses in this part of Long Island. By the early years of the eighteenth century many of the early settlers were living in small, comfortable, labor-intensive cottages, most often saltbox shaped with the sloping roof on the north and the two-story façade on the sunnier south. Gradually, as part of a newly independent nation, some people felt prosperous enough and optimistic enough to build larger houses in a restrained, straightforward style, and as time went on, in more contemporary fashions such as Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival and Neoclassical. Even without zoning boards and building codes, these were almost always well-designed and executed, with suitable materials and correct proportions. Some of the best nineteenth century houses were built in Sag Harbor during its wealthy years as an important whaling port.
With the extension of the Long Island Railroad in the late nineteenth century, summer colonies developed in East Hampton and Southampton villages and in rare instances in outlying areas. They experimented with styles—Gothic, Queen Anne and Stick Style among them—but Shingle Style, “cottages” which related to the local vernacular and were a direct rebuff to the gilded marble palaces of Newport, became the preferred vacation house architecture. Many of these architectural treasures survive, but others, often the largest ones, were demolished, especially in the 1930s and 1940s—reflecting changed economic conditions in the Great Depression and the scarcity of domestic help and restricted supplies of gasoline in the Second World War.
Traditional Shingle Style architecture roared back into fashion in the early 1990s after a period of modernism and an absurd turn to Postmodernism, and quickly became the gold standard. The best of these houses are a joy, relating sympathetically to their antecedents and their surroundings, with accommodations for a contemporary lifestyle. The poorer examples are a hodge-podge of discordant elements, lacking grace and beauty, quickly constructed, often on spec, in a frenzied building boom. The traditional estate areas could hardly contain this expansion, so every neighborhood in the Hamptons became a target, resulting in a vapid suburbanization of our woods and fields.
More than a few of the hulky McMansions of the last decade or so, puffed up and pretentious, mismatched with their neighbors, expensive to maintain, wasteful of energy, and destructive of the environment—with no ready buyers in a completely transformed market—may very well become the white elephants of our time.