This Hamptons Home Was Once Embroiled in a Feud Between High-Powered Neighbors. Now It’s Listed for $37 Million.
A minimalist residence set along the pristine shore of Georgica Pond in East Hampton, New York, and designed specifically to showcase a museum-quality collection of artworks, was recently listed for $37 million. The low-slung residence that now sprawls across the 2.4-acre property was built in 2008 on the footprint of an older, midcentury home and has a winding history that involves an influential American architect, a Manhattan museum, a home and lifestyle magnate, a real estate tycoon, and a renowned textile designer.
In 1962, Gordon Bunshaft, an influential proponent of the International Style of architecture and the lead designer on New York’s sublime Lever House building, designed and built he and his wife Nina an elegantly understated 26-foot by 100-foot modernist pavilion. Due to the light-colored stone used for the floors and the external cladding, the structure came to be known as Travertine House. Gordon died in 1990, and when Nina passed away in 1994, she willed the property to The Museum of Modern Art, who, claiming they could not afford to maintain the home, sold it the following year for a dollop over $3 million to Martha Stewart, who already owned a big, shingle-clad mansion about two miles away.
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Stewart quickly engaged minimalist master John Pawson to redo the interior spaces. After the demo work but before the re-construction, Stewart got into a kerfuffle with the next-door neighbor, real estate developer Harry Macklowe, over a row of shrubs the domestic diva claimed the property tycoon planted on her property. Attorneys were engaged, and Stewart infamously pinned one of Macklowe’s gardeners to a gate with her car (no charges were filed) before she tired of the whole affair, abandoned the renovation, and gave the house to her daughter Alexis, who hung on to her mother’s abandoned project it until 2005, when it was sold for $9 million to late and renowned textile designer Donald Maharam and his wife Bonnie.
When he took possession, Maharam told the New York Times that Bunshaft’s waterside jewel box was in shambles; according to at least one report, all the travertine had been removed and hauled off to Stewart’s estate in Katonah, New York. So, much to the chagrin of preservationists who argued the gutted pavilion could and should be restored to its original form, Maharam razed the original structure and, working from the same footprint, built a 7,000-square-foot sprawler with 12-foot-high ceilings, bluestone floor tiles, and full-height walls of glass that ensure the glinting waters of Georgica Pond are ever-present from much of the home.
There are a total of four bedrooms and an equal number of bathrooms, plus a powder room, along with an enormous combination living and dining room, a double-island eat-in kitchen with marble countertops, and a small library/den with custom wooden built-ins that include a desk. The primary bedroom has a dreamy view over Georgica Pond and all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, and two more con-joined bedrooms are contained in a separate, semi-detached wing, while a fully detached bungalow houses another bedroom and bath.
The bluestone floors extend out to terraces with idyllic views over a great sweep of lawn that extends to the pond’s edge. A large, grassy courtyard between the main house and the guest bedrooms has a simple 50-foot-long rectangular pool alongside a bluestone terrace for sunbathing.
The property is available through Frank E. Newbold and Beate V. Moore at Sotheby’s International Realty—Bridgehampton Brokerage.
Click here for more photos of 84 Georgica Close.
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