Open Houses

Last month, Hamptons 20th Century Modern, a nonprofit “promoting greater awareness and conservancy of residences designed in the modern American vernacular on Long Island, New York,” invited locals and tourists alike to join the cause in person, on a tour of four homes plus a synagogue. Exactly why these modern homes were in such dire need of awareness and conservancy became clear as we marched with valor through the works of Andrew Geller, Norman Jaffe, and Harry Bates: they’re simply too small for the Hamptons of now.

“I think people are sort of overdoing their vacation houses,” the architect Forrest Frazier told me, referring to the mega-mansions cropping up in the area. We were standing inside Andrew Geller’s whimsical Antler House, which Frazier’s office restored in 2019, going back to the original 1968 drawings to recover funky details like the owl’s eye windows. It’s on the market for $2.7 million. In the eyes of prospective buyers, the land is more valuable than the architecture. For the house to be preserved, Frazier mused, it would have to be moved to the side of the property, making way for something grander. Thus, what was once a main house becomes a guest house, a pool house, some idiosyncratic addition to a much larger plainer estate.

It would be a fitting fate. The Antler House seems like a treehouse already, packing three stories into a very narrow footprint. There’s even a spacious alcove above the stairs perfect for making blanket forts, which is what the current owners’ children were up to when we strolled through. Without the children present, the alcove’s purpose would be a puzzle the average visitor, and this ambiguity delighted me. The joy of Geller’s homes is their interest in what isn’t obvious. They pose questions: How many rooms can you stack on top of each other? How many corners can you trick into one wall? How much life can you get out of a space?

But this curiosity isn’t something obscene wealth is interested in; in fact, it seems almost bored by it, its stresses and fears so alleviated that all joys are more expected than discovered. To build for the extremely rich, it turns out, is mostly to demolish, to flatten a charming oddity and set up a fortress in its place, or what would be a fortress if it weren’t so transparent. Curiosity, or really joy, can’t survive when everything is already on display. The dullness of the present-day Hamptons architecture stuns in its excess.

There are no false pretenses of lesser wealth in the restorations Hamptons 20th Century Modern is keen to promote, though. If anything, the campaigners merely celebrate those for whom having a house is a hobby. Houses built with hidden staircases and tucked-away beds and rooms that turn into other rooms are defiantly unfit for aging, temporary by design. Should you die in a playhouse, it probably won’t be on purpose.

The restoration of an East Hampton Harry Bates–designed home seemed most aware of this paradox of philosophy versus experience. Robert Dean, the architect who came into possession of the property, renovated it for his daughter, adding a second wing everyone seemed committed to saying was the sort of thing Bates would have wanted, had he built a larger house. That he had not built a larger house didn’t seem to matter one bit to the current inhabitants.

This is the problem with taking things from the past and trying to live seamlessly in them: many people simply don’t want to. Instead, they jam together a renovation of ideas you theoretically agree with but practically reject. This is most clear in the owners’ cars. The modest parking deck Frazier tacked onto the rear of the Antler House serves as decorative storage for kayaks and fishing props; the SUVs parked next to it are simply too big to fit inside. The Bates house, in fact, had been built with no garage. The architect-dad set one up by the entryway in his new design. Curiously, there was a window in which to peek through, something I’ve never seen or even imagined in a garage. Inside sat a Porsche. The purpose of the detail, like everything else in the Hamptons, was obvious.