The house that replaced the Gordon Bunshaft house on Georgica Pond, as shown in listing photos, looks a little like its predecessor, but it’s much larger — more than three times the size.
Photo: Sotheby’s
A modernist East Hampton house that replaced a beloved and rare Gordon Bunshaft home has hit the market, asking $37 million. The sprawling, white four-bedroom house at 84 Georgica Close Road, located on 2.4 acres with waterfront views, was built in 2008 by the late textile magnate Donald Maharam, who upset just about everyone when he knocked the Bunshaft house down. What he replaced it with is nice enough — it’s about as tasteful as a 7,000-square-foot house can be, with some nods to the original Bunshaft design, and, like Bunshaft’s, also designed to display a substantial art collection. But the new house isn’t nearly as interesting as the long, strange saga that destroyed its predecessor.
The Bunshaft home, sometimes called the Travertine House, before it was demolished.
Photo: John Roca/NY Daily News Archive via Getty
Bunshaft, a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill known for designing modern office buildings like Lever House and notable cultural centers like the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, built the Georgica Close house for himself in 1962. A 26-by-100-foot structure clad in travertine marble, it had clerestory windows, a huge living room with a wall of glass overlooking the pond, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a small windowless kitchen. It was the only residential building Bunshaft ever designed. When his widow died in 1994, she willed the property to MoMA, which claimed it couldn’t afford the upkeep and sold it to Martha Stewart the following year for around $3 million.
The 50-foot heated pool, as shown in listing photos, is one of the new additions to the 2.4-acre property.
Photo: Sotheby’s
Stewart was, in many ways, an unlikely buyer of the home. Why would someone who loved to entertain and had a nice big Victorian in the same town buy such a monastic, severe little house? She vowed to be a good steward of what was widely considered to be an architectural masterpiece, promising to leave the exterior intact. But she hired British architect John Pawson to do an interior renovation — as she told The New Yorker in 1995, she was planning to do away with the tenement-style kitchen and build a big, open one with lots of stainless steel in the studio/second bedroom. “The next time you come here, the new kitchen will be ready, and no doubt it will look very much like an atomic submarine,” she said.
In the midst of the process, however, Stewart became embroiled in a feud with her neighbor, the real-estate developer Harry Macklowe, over some plantings on the property line. Stewart claimed Macklowe had planted the shrubs and trees on her property. Macklowe, who’d owned his house since 1989, claimed adverse possession (basically squatter’s rights), and a bitter legal battle ensued. The town ruled that Stewart could remove 14 shrubs and trees out of a grouping of about 100 plants; Macklowe got an appeal with a restraining order after Stewart had already started ripping them out. Wetlands were invoked. At one point, Stewart backed her car into one of Macklowe’s landscapers, pinning him to a gate (no charges were filed). The whole affair so piqued Stewart that she abandoned the renovation and turned the property over to her daughter, Alexis. And for years, it sat, unfinished and empty, until Alexis sold it to Maharam for around $9 million in 2005 (shortly after Stewart’s insider-trading case wrapped up and she went to prison on a lesser conviction).
The living room in the new house, as shown in listing photos, also features large windows that capitalize on the view of Georgica Pond.
Photo: Sotheby’s
The exterior looked pretty much fine to a lot of people, but Maharam argued that he’d bought a wreck and had no choice but to knock it down. He had “all sorts of ugly” on his hands, he told the New York Times. “It was gutted and in no condition to be restored.” Preservationists grumbled that even if the insides were a wreck, he still could have saved the exterior. “What bastards,” Michael Gotkin of the Modern Architecture Working Group complained to New York at the time. “It is a very important house. Regardless of the present condition, the exterior could certainly be restored to its original appearance, if only the owner was willing.” Some people thought it was somewhat ironic that Maharam, whose corporate-textiles company had become a design-world darling after his sons revived the prints of famous modernists like Alexander Girard and Gio Ponti, should be the one to destroy the only example of Bunshaft’s work done on a small scale. Some suspected that the 2,300-square-foot house was simply too small for his taste. He told the Times that the new house would be “in the spirit of the former house, using the same footprint,” but it obviously ended up being quite a bit larger.
Maharam died in 2022, which most likely accounts for its being placed up for sale. The listing, with Frank Newbold and Beate Moore of Sotheby’s, notes that the home has 12-foot-high ceilings, bluestone floors, and a 50-foot heated swimming pool, and was custom-built in 2008 by Trunzo Building Contractors. A venerable local firm, it seems, but no Gordon Bunshaft.
Source link