Month: October 2020

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Some things in life are forever, especially in Hamptons real estate. Take 42 Old Montauk Highway, Montauk, for instance. The place has been on the price LOLlercoaster for more than 10 years now. Back in 2009, the ask was $35 million. Undaunted, the owner, Eli Wilner (the well-known frame maker and dealer), raised the price to $50 six months later. Ever since then the price has gone up and down with the tides, from a high of $55 million in 2016 to a realistic $29 million in late 2019. Now the property is asking $54 million.

So what do you, rich buyer, get for that? Well, 37 acres of oceanfront land, which is fabulous, including ponds. You get the house, which has two rather nice details, the beautiful staircase

and the stunning sliding doors that replicate The Chariot of Aurora, an art deco style mural from the Normandie luxury liner. (The original mural is now in the Carnegie Museum.)

Aaaaand that’s about it. Sadly. The house is done in an inexplicable Asian pagoda style. The floors are shiny, cold marble, which probably looked great on the Normandie, but this is a beach house, not a deco luxury liner. The interiors are uninviting. There isn’t even a pool. And since much of the 37 acres are preserve, who even knows what could be built there? (Apparently Wilner bought the place in 1992 for $630K, without any permits in place to build, which was a gamble.)

Pandemic or no pandemic, we can’t picture this place trading at $54 million. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

• Montauk Hideaway [OE]

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Flex your architectural muscles by inviting people round to your landmark rental. “Of course, there are a number of Peter Blake houses on the East End,” you’d say. “But this is the house he built for his own family.”

Designed in 1954, the house got its name because it looks like a pinwheel from above. “I wanted to be able to open the walls up to the views but close them in winter or during a hurricane,” Blake said. ”That was the origin of the pinwheel idea.”

Drawing via Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University

Architecture critic Alastair Gordon wrote: “The perimeter line between inside and outside, between architecture and landscape, was effectively dissolved . . . Here was Action Architecture realized: a house that could respond to the weather, the views, and the personal moods of its inhabitants.”

Of course, back in 1954, Water Mill was very different. The house stood in the middle of a field; now it’s surrounded by houses. Blake said in 1999, “That whole area, before all the twits came in, was all about landscape, views of the water, and so on.”

Our ideas about vacation/weekend houses have changed since 1954, too. Small, well-designed architectural whimsies are now pool houses (such as Andrew Geller’s Double Diamond house) or guest houses, as the Pinwheel House often serves to the mansion next door. Still, in 1998, the house was upsized from a teensy 2-bedroom, 1-bath into a 3,000-square-foot one with 5 bedrooms and 6 baths. Fortunately the integrity of the original structure has been maintained.

Interested? The Pinwheel House is available for an eye-watering $170K year-round rent. Bragging rights, of course, are priceless.

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