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Although we prefer Manhattan to come to us, every now and then we cross the Shinnecock Canal and venture into Gotham. This past winter, we were impressed with all the new residential building in town, and surprised to see that it is happening in every neighborhood that we ventured into, inserting fabulous new apartment buildings, luxury interlopers, among gritty old structures.
It’s a trend that parallels something here in the Hamptons. Important estates are no longer restricted to the traditional estate areas. Up until about 1980, and for generations before that, money and society concentrated in the so-called estate areas of East Hampton and Southampton, or south of the highway (but not necessarily on the ocean) in the smaller villages of Water Mill, Bridgehampton and Wainscott. There were of course individual properties here and there that broke the rule, but they were clearly anomalies. The only general exception was Amagansett, where the Devon Colony, north of the highway, was more than the match of its southern sibling.
In many ways, it paralleled Manhattan where Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue Central Park West and a few other streets had unmatchable cache, and many other very good addresses were content to be slightly in their shadow.
In the Hamptons it began to change significantly in the early 1980s and really gained legs in the 1990s, to the point where the price differential now between north and south has narrowed and the social connotations have all but vanished. The timing in New York was generally similar, with offbeat downtown areas like SoHo becoming more and more sought after.
These days, a buyer goes north of the highway in the Hamptons or downtown in New York or even to other boroughs by choice, not because of price. And very often that buyer will make both choices. As Stephen Drucker, the editor of House Beautiful, recently pointed out to me in a discussion about real estate, for some people the East Hampton and Southampton estate areas are the equivalent of the Upper East Side, prime real estate to be sure but not their style. They would not live there even though they can afford it. So it suddenly makes sense that hip downtown residents are buying important houses on Main Street in Sag Harbor rather than one of the Southampton lanes.
The responses were interesting when I asked a few agents about north of the highway listings. Mala Sander, of the Allen M. Schneider Associates Sag Harbor office, showed me a sprawling, 7,800 square foot traditional house that ate up a 1930s cottage. The cottage was the kind of house that used to be more typical of what you’d find on an acre in the Noyac area. But now you find a mix, a wide ranging, heterogeneous goulash of houses and, more importantly, people.
The diversity of architectural styles and lifestyles, like their urban counterparts in New York City, results in something flavorful and vibrant, the opposite of planned communities and Disney perfection. By traditional real estate guidelines, this mix was not so good. But we all know better now.
The $4.150 million price tag for the Noyac house approaches south of the highway prices, but it’s an interesting, original house, and you undeniably get a lot of luxury. And, I would guess, some interesting neighbors.
A note on Manhattan influences on Hamptons real estate:
The New York Times reported that new, amenity filled modern glass high rises, designed by big name architects, are challenging the status and hitherto (unparalleled) place of pre-war apartment buildings. Can it happen here? Can smart modernism and super luxury knock out of the box our traditional estates or our massive shingle style reproductions? Answer: not likely in the first case, replacing traditional estates; quite possible in the second, especially replacing all that formulaic and prosaic new construction.