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During the French revolution it was quite incorrect to look aristocratic. Courtiers could end up decapitated for having pomegranates embroidered on their jackets or for other breaches of liberty, equality and fraternity. Certain aristos, unable or unwilling to conform to egalitarian ideals, thought it was a cause worthy enough to give up not just their powered wigs, but the heads underneath them. We sometimes detect the same sense of privilege in Hamptons real estate. When you spend millions or tens of millions of dollars on a home, it is hard to avoid a sense of entitlement. But instead of the threat of a guillotine, fate humbles us with traffic jams on Route 27. Fate does not dare intrude on those privileged few with private helicopters. Only fog does, and presumably their souls will someday be tortured by the remembrance of their carbon footprints. Also presuming they have read Dante.
When Mariah Carey forked over $350,000 to rent Tommy Hilfiger’s East Hampton house for August this year, it was perfect gossip. Famous names and extravagant amounts of money are deliciously newsy. But the people who drive the real estate market here are usually not famous or even particularly glamorous. They are however, very rich. In their world big bank accounts are the only credentials you need for entitlement.
Perhaps it is not so different from the Gilded Age of the great robber barons who ascended a century or so ago. But there are mobs of them now, hordes, masses, brigades of wealthy people sweeping out of the west across the Shinnecock Canal. The super rich, in some eerie Darwinian way, are expanding and driving the merely rich into the shadows, if not quite into extinction.
Paradoxically, as the prices of real estate have soared the experience of real estate has been trivialized. I remember about 20 years ago, when I was still involved with real estate brokerage, showing houses to Anne Bass. She traveled by car with a driver, was perfectly groomed and immaculately dressed in a skirt and blouse, stockings and little flat shoes. It is hard to imagine that happening now when people show up after tennis, sweaty and in shorts, and negotiate for multi million properties as casually as they shop for smoked salmon at Citarella. “Add a million.” “I want the nova sliced thin.” It’s all the same.
Being outrageously rich in the Hamptons is a populist sport. Our everyman, our average Joe, really looks like everyone else, acts like everyone else, wears the same jeans and sneakers, but he measures his millions in the double or triple digits.
One reason might be their youth. Being young makes them more individualistic and less establishment than previous generations. They are mildly insubordinate, if hardly anarchists. Usually self made and well educated, they reject the superficial trappings of old money and old society. In the Hamptons, they don’t care about north or south of the highway, just as in New York they are as likely to live downtown as on Park Avenue. But their core values—like getting your kids into the right school—are traditional.
They make anyone over fifty feel like a dinosaur and anyone with less than fifty million a little shabby. I asked Sotheby’s broker Frank Newbold, who is looking at his current $40 million East Hampton oceanfront listing. “In my experience, some of the least likely looking clients are the most affluent. They jump right off their Gulfstream 5 in exercise clothes and flip flops. It would be hard to pick out the billionaire in a line-up with surfers.”