Author: Laura Euler

Great news for us Hamptons old-timers: the Old Stove Pub is back! The 200-year-old farmhouse with the red horse in front* has been purchased by Joseph DeCristofaro, who intends to keep it open year-round. (We’re happy for our own selfish reasons: our entire life, we’ve driven past that sign on our way to Montauk and we’d be sad if it went away.)

The original restaurant opened in 1967 as an Irish pub, thus the name. But within a few years it turned into a Greek steak restaurant. DeCristofaro has redone everything beautifully, just about the way it always was, including the LeRoy Nieman prints; the gorgeous old wide-plank floors are freshened up for a new century. The piano has been moved to the porch, though. Right now, the pub is offering tables outside as well as in, with appealing live music playing as well.

Now, as to the food. Good news is that the menu includes old favorites like the Sagaponack steak and Greek favorites like saganaki (bubbling hot Halloumi cheese topped with olive oil and lemon), Greek salad and stuffed eggplant. My companion, cookbook author Stacy Dermont, and I enjoyed a light snack of a dip trio (baba ghanoush, tzatziki, and hummus) along with chips and pita, as well as melon with prosciutto and spiralized zucchini chips. All were delicious. I had a spicy margarita with a jalapeno coin and edge rimmed with chili sugar, while Stacy enjoyed a paloma.

We sat outside, while a cellist and a saxophonist played modern tunes; it was a wonderful evening in the Hamptons. Highly recommended.

*Can anyone tell us if this is the actual red horse that used to be in front of the hippie Levi’s store in East Hampton, which is now known as Red Horse Market? Based on our memories from the early 1970s, that horse was rearing high on its back legs.

• Old Stove Pub [FB]

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Address: 100 Edgemere Street, Montauk

Price: $895,000

Tie this week with the higher price of $995,000. We really like this place—of course it’s teensy, but there’s everything you need, including a laundry room, a wine fridge, high-end appliances and all. It even includes trendy matt black hardware in the master bathroom. Plus there’s a nice little eating area out back and storage in a loft and a cellar. For a young couple, this is great—walk to and from the train, jitney, Surf Lodge (eventually), Montauk Brewing, and so on. Good job, whoever flipped this.

• In Town Charming Fully Renovated Cottage [OE]
• How much for a renovated cottage in Montauk? [HHS]

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There’s still plenty of summer left. If you haven’t landed a Hamptons rental yet, now is a great time to get one, as landlords are ready to make deals. Here are three at different price points.

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Amagansett

75 Montauk Highway
Price: $55,000 (Aug)
The Lowdown: A deep lot in the heart of the village of Amagansett makes for an easy walk to restaurants or shopping, yet for privacy in the pool set far back. This delightful period house was renovated in 2013, keeping the best of the old while bringing everything up to date. The exterior offers sweeping lawns for croquet, mature shrubs, flower gardens and lots of big, open sky.

 

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Montauk
220 Old Montauk Highway

Price: $225,000 (Aug-LD)
The Lowdown: We’ve found heaven on earth and it’s on Old Montauk Highway. This property belongs to interior designer Vicente Wolf, and every room is worthy of being bragged about on Instagram. The views are amazing of course. Spend August going from the gunite pool to the patio, and of course, either surf the waves or just walk on the beach.

 

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Westhampton Beach
19 Bayfield Lane
Price: $65,000 (Aug-LD)
The Lowdown: No shortage of places to sit in the lovely summery home. Sip lemonade on the grass. Iced tea on porch? Rosé in the sunroom? Pimms by the pool? This house is owned by English bestselling author Helen Simonson, so there are plenty of books and even a writing nook by the pool house. There’s a huge barn filled with adult toys like a pool table, as well as pretty gardens with roses, arbors, and hammocks.

Price That House! is our price guessing game. We provide some details and pictures from a local listing, and you have a go at the price. Thursday, we reveal the answer. Remember, this is all for fun, so please: no wagering.

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What/Where: 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms / Montauk

Square footage: 800 square foot (main)

Acreage: 0.12

The Deets: This bijou cottage has been completely transformed, with new kitchen and baths, HVAC, and a very cute laundry room with barn doors. There’s a dining area out back and an outdoor shower. Yes, it’s small, but for a couple, would make a perfect little getaway. It even comes furnished.

Now—how much are they asking for it?

 

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Well, maybe. The mixed-use property is listed this week with Enzo Morabito of Douglas Elliman for $13.9 million. This is prime real estate adjacent to the new John Steinbeck Park, with current tenants 7-Eleven, Sing City Chinese restaurant and Water Street Wine & Spirits. Located at 22 Long Island Avenue / 22 West Water Street, the 0.67-acre property comprises a circa-1950 15,000-plus-square-foot commercial building with eight retail units, four office suites and a total of 30 parking spaces.

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Why “maybe”? Because Southampton and Sag Harbor Village are discussing purchasing the property with CPF funds, according to the Sag Harbor Express. What to do with it, town officials don’t know–maybe add parking to the new park, maybe use the building for something else commercial.

Not that anyone listens to us, but we tend to think this is a mistake. We sometimes shop at the 7-Eleven or the liquor store and these are handy businesses to have downtown. We thought it was a mistake when East Hampton purchased the former Star Room property and turned it into a park, too. Downtowns need to have businesses for residents to pick up their Slurpees, liquor and General Tso’s, and towns need more jobs, not fewer. That said, we don’t live in Sag Harbor nor Southampton, so take it for what it’s worth. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

• 22 Long Island Avenue, Sag Harbor [Elliman]

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There are a lot of so-called Shingle Style houses around the Hamptons. But this is the real thing and it’s a knockout. Originally known as Crossways, this house was built in 1888 by Mr. and Mrs. Edward Bell. The Bells bought a number of acres from the original Foster family for $6,000 in 1887 and 1889 to build their estate, which in their day included the main house, a large carriage house, a barn, a greenhouse, an icehouse, and a large caretaker’s cottage.

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Mr. Bell was a successful stockbroker with his own firm who served as a New York City parks commissioner in 1894. Although many hoped he’d run for mayor of New York on the Democratic ticket, he died suddenly of typhoid in 1902, so he didn’t get to enjoy his Southampton home for long.

The Crossways was built by James L’Hommedieu (1833-1892), a builder and designer from the Hempstead area, best known today for having designed the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City.

In 1927, the next owner of the property subdivided it, separating the main house from the carriage house and caretaker’s house. The caretaker’s cottage still exists and is a private home. Unfortunately, the carriage house was demolished in 2014.

Now, the property is about one acre, which includes extremely pretty English-style gardens, a gunite pool and even a sports court. The house is about 7,400 square feet, which includes 10 bedrooms, 8 full baths, and 2 half baths, and includes a rare third story.

The property looks to be in excellent condition and lovingly cared for, with a high end kitchen and redone baths. The only downsides to a house like this is that it’s historic, so it lacks enormously high ceilings and a cavernous kitchen. (Of course, back in 1888, the Bells’ meals were cooked by servants.)

Asking price for the house, represented by Michaela Keszler at Douglas Elliman, is $18.95 million. The place last sold in 2011 for $10.5 million. What do you think? Worth it for a slice of history?

• Southampton Village Beauty In Most Desirable Location [HRE]

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Address: 1145 Sagg Main, Sagaponack

Price: $22,950,000

Oh you sweet beautiful bastards. None of you got the answer right; all guesses were on the higher side, with the majority at $24,950,000 but many at the higher end. What, do you think it’s still the glory days of 2014. (Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end…well, they did.) Anyway, maybe that means that this property will sell fairly soon. You get a lot for your 23 large, including 8 acres (great for the next time the Poors come by with pitchforks), a rather swell sitting area on the dunes, and two houses. Granted, the houses could use a bit of updating, but really nothing major, so we think a good deal is to be had here.

• Oceanfront Estate in Sagaponack on 8 Acres  [HRE]
• How much for 8 acres on the ocean in Sagaponack? [HHS]

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Larry Vaughn, the mayor of Amity in the movie Jaws, is having a hard time as of late. The poor hapless politician is now a pandemic meme, with opinion pieces in the New York Times comparing him to Donald Trump. In the movie, Mayor Larry ordered the beaches to stay open even though there was evidence that a massive shark was offshore waiting to eat everyone in town. “You yell ‘shark,’” he says, “we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.”

But let’s be fair. Yes, some parts of a girl washed up on the beach. But hey, Amity has never had problems with sharks before, and then the coroner agreed that the girl had been killed in a boating accident. And the mayor had science on his side: shark attacks, especially fatal ones, are exceedingly rare in the Northeast. Take that, Chief Citiot Brody!

“Amity is a summer town. We need summer dollars,” says Mayor Larry.

We Hamptons residents live in summer towns, where we need summer dollars. We’ve faced the same issue the mayor did: close everything down to avoid Covid-19? Ruining people’s businesses and livelihoods? Or open up somewhat to try to keep things going? How many people will die if we do? What about city folks? Are they going to clog up our only hospital?

So far, things are going fairly well in the Hamptons, better than they went in Amity. With the beaches open by order of the mayor, the shark then kills the little Kitner boy. Local fishermen catch a shark, and cheering, everyone agrees this is the killer shark. But Hooper, after dissecting the shark, declares this isn’t the shark that killed the girl and the little Kitner boy. Mayor Larry, who is not going to have his summer economy ruined by a rich-boy egghead’s opinion, declines to close the beaches.

“It’s a beautiful day,” Mayor Larry tells a reporter. “The beaches are open and people are having a wonderful time.”

Not so much on that. The shark entered a nearby estuary and killed a boater. After that, Brody convinces the mayor to hire Quint to kill the shark.

Hindsight is so easy, isn’t it? In hindsight, we can judge Mayor Larry for allowing two people to die. (You can’t blame the girl’s death on him. Though to be honest, without the town hiring Quint, the shark wouldn’t have eaten Quint in the biggest metaphor of 1970s moviemaking. So maybe three people as Mayor Larry’s death toll.)

On the plus side, Mayor Larry had exemplary sartorial sense. Just look at his blazers. Few, indeed, are the men who can carry off a jacket covered in little anchors, especially the mayors of small seaside towns. Even for the 70s, Mayor Larry was a trailblazer.

Also, while it’s easy for us to judge—blah blah blah, if Mayor Larry didn’t exist, there would be no narrative tension to the story, all horror stories need a bad guy, the beaches would stay closed, blah blah—although what if the beaches did stay closed? The shark would get even more hungry and angry and then what? When people went swimming after Labor Day, the shark would eat probably six, maybe eight people, because that’s how this works and also the town would be bankrupt—anyway, getting back to it being easy for us to judge: remember, Larry was still mayor in Jaws II. So obviously the townspeople didn’t hold any deaths against him. If they didn’t, maybe we should overlook a few bad days in one summer.

Mayor Larry, like so many of us, was a flawed human being. Yes, he should have closed the beaches. But he did his best to serve his town’s citizens as he saw fit. And he looked incredibly swell while doing it.

We’ve said it so many times–price your property right when it’s listed and you’ll be much better off. With, of course, the caveat that it can be hard to tell what a good initial ask is. However, we all know there are those sellers who insist their property is worth much more than it really is, and who say things like “I don’t have to sell.”

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This property, on Georgica Close Road, was ambitiously priced from the beginning. Remember those heady days of August 2015? Obama was president, the Greek debt crisis, Kanye West announcing he was running for president in 2020? (Yes, he did.) This property, two acres on an inlet of Georgica Pond, was listed for a cool $15 million.

We will say, the seller has been fairly proactive about slicing the price in the past five years. Now the property, represented by Lori Barbaria at Douglas Elliman, is asking just $6.5 million; $1.5 million was shaved off the price yesterday. Is that low enough, though?

First, let’s see what’s on offer here. Even back in 2015, we were in love with the pool with the boulders in it, but then we love natural-style pools. Most people in the Hamptons, though, want the standard rectangle surrounded by grass. The two acres also includes a cute pond (we’re also a sucker for ponds) and views of Georgica Pond as well as a tennis court. The house itself is 5000 square feet home with seven bedrooms, seven bathrooms, two powder rooms, an open living area, and four fireplaces. But it’s dated and not in a good way and the furnishings aren’t doing it any favors. We’d have a good architect come in and redesign the place for a fun retro look, which would be very cute and not too expensive.

So we guess it comes down to someone having the ability to see what could be there. 112 Georgica Close Road is also waterfront, also two acres, and asking $2 million less. (We’re not fans of the house, though.)

We’ll keep an eye on this place. We think there’s a deal to be had. Let us know what you think in the comments.

• 104 Georgica Close Road [Elliman]

 

 

 

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Price That House! is our price guessing game. We provide some details and pictures from a local listing, and you have a go at the price. Thursday, we reveal the answer. Remember, this is all for fun, so please: no wagering.

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What/Where: 10 bedrooms, 11 bathrooms / Sagaponack

Square footage: 6000 square foot (main)

Acreage: 8

The Deets: Avid Hamptons real estate watchers will remember this place. It sold, along with 23 acres of preserved farmland with barn, back in the autumn of 2014 for $27 million. The buyers just wanted the farmland, so the house along with eight acres, which includes 300 feet of oceanfront, a house and guest house, and views of Sagg Pond as well of the ocean, was put back on the market for $33 million in 2015. Five years later, it’s still on the market.

Now—how much are they asking for it?

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