High Drama
We remember Goose Creek, the house, before it went on growth hormones. It was nice, normal, rich person’s house, at least the way rich people lived in the Hamptons 20 years ago. They actually made do with four or five bedrooms, a maid’s room, a good living room and library, all in perhaps 3,500 to 4,500 square feet. It now seems closer to the colonial past than to contemporary lifestyles, certainly a droll and curious way for the mega-rich to spend their weekends.
Architecture: There is still a shingle house that now deferentially leads to a fabricated but beguiling Mediterranean themed opus. If the older part is shy in a sense, the newer parts are racy and intoxicating.
Site: A bit over 5 acres at the head of Goose Creek, a small inlet of Georgica Pond. It is pretty and peaceful, but don’t expect expansive views of water. This house, so proud of itself, looks inward with courtyards.
The inside word: A lot of famous people, including Madonna, Liza, J-Lo and Ben, Warren and Annette, Kevin Costner, and Gena Davis have rented Goose Creek, and for good reason. You never have to mingle with the common folk. Within its posh 25,000 square feet, you have your own 110-seat movie theater, indoor pool, Turkish bath and sauna, gym, massage room, tanning salon, and billiard room—all the comforts of Beverly Hills right here in Wainscott. On the market at $24 million, but make an offer. Please.
Hail to the Queen
Brush up your Shakespeare. Or at least rev up your imagination. There is an Elizabethan (style) house on the market, and there are few residences like it in the Hamptons. Interestingly, the oldest part of the house dates back to 1648, only 45 years after the death of Queen Elizabeth I. But the Elizabethan manor look is the result of a 1911 addition and renovation.
Architecture: An inventive, almost poetical vision of Elizabethan architecture. J. Greenleaf Thorpe, one of most important East Hampton architects of the period, is responsible for a lasting contribution to the look of the village.
Site: One acre on Main Street, overlooking the village green and Town Pond, with their unmistakable English genealogy. Yes, it’s right on the road, but in a perfect setting.
The inside word: This is not the soulless, easy interpretation of English country houses that builders now are putting up almost daily. The English Arts and Crafts movement early in the twentieth century was a serious reaction to Victorian fulsomeness, not just a passing trend. QE1 details take work: the small-paned casement windows, for example, or the half-timbered gables, or the carved wooden brackets. Offered at $3.990 million.
Beauty and Brains
The term “smart house” is used in the building trades and the real estate world to describe a home with advanced electronic systems, one wired to do what our brains and fingers used to take care of. Subsystems like lighting, security, TV, sound, heating and cooling, even kitchens and fireplaces are programmed and computer controlled.
Architecture: This sprawling 12,000 square foot house incorporates most of the fashionable elements of the current architectural syllabus. There are porches and gables and circles and octagons, appendages and indentations, a cupola up there, an infinity edge down here, something for the eye in every direction.
Site: Two acres on Town Line Road, in a still somewhat rural part of Wainscott.
The inside word: This is a smart house in more than the technical sense. What could be smarter than a spec builder getting his house lavishly furnished and on display for the Hamptons glitterati to traipse through? Currently spiffed up as the Hamptons Designer Showhouse, the home looks unquestionably swank, absolutely trendy—and it is unmarred by human inhabitants. Offered at $7.5 million.
[Sidebar]
Show Me the Money
Real estate and social life are inseparable in the Hamptons. Just try getting through a cocktail party without a real estate conversation. But the two are more than usually conjoined at the Hamptons Designer Showhouse, a benefit event for Southampton Hospital.
Not only have the decorators delivered the consummate hip, polished and pricey looks of the moment in every room and even in the closets and cupboards. The house itself is built on spec and is on the market for sale.
Construction was in progress until moments before the opening cocktail party. What was not actually finished was at least not visible with all those expensive fabrics and dazzling objets d’art and lavish furnishings to distract us.
I have to admit my favorite part was not the decoration but the wine cellar. The wood is sleek and regal, the tile cool and silken, the ambience courtly and refined. It’s far larger and more elaborate than almost anyone, even serious wine connoisseurs, would need. But the point of a show house is fantasy, not reality, illusions, not banality. Showhouses, after all, are supposed to be showy.