An Eccentric Greek Revival in Sag Harbor

The house at 85 Suffolk Street looked like a Victorian when George and Valerie Justin bought it in 1995. As the Justins peeled back chipped shingles, they found vertical stripes of board-and-batten siding. Layers of paint revealed the shadows of dentil moldings, rosettes, and Greek key designs. Another house was hiding inside, and they pulled it out. As Valerie told the Sag Harbor Express at the time, “Underneath, we found a Greek Revival.”

“No one had ever really intervened in that house, in a consequential way,” said Darren Waterston, a friend who helped them move in and who remembered old fixtures, an overgrown yard. No. 85 first shows up on a map of the town in 1873. It’s named as the home of David Porter Vail, who captained two whalers before getting into lumber, said Richard Doctorow, of the Sag Harbor Whaling & Historical Museum. After the Vails, only two other families owned it before the Justins arrived. Their restoration, which won a local award, revealed wide plank floors and brick walls within the two-story wood frame house. They painted an old banister bright red. A barn out back was renovated to become a huge studio, with a kitchen and a bath, and the kitchen of the main house was left open, creating an airy, social space.

Andrea, Valerie, and George Justin.
Photo: Provided by Susan Felleman

The couple had come here to retire in a walkable town that was only a Jitney ride from the city where they had fallen in love 40 years earlier. Valerie Sharaf was an escapee from middle-class Connecticut who had first come to New York to study film. George Justin was a native Lower East Sider who spent World War II in the Signal Corps, the army’s communications wing, and came home to work on local shoots, according to a forthcoming documentary on his life, In Production: The Life and Career of George Justin. In 1953, the year they met, Elia Kazan hired George to manage the production of On the Waterfront — a difficult undertaking, involving dozens of extras dressed as longshoremen, filmed on location at a working dock over a freezing winter. The film won eight Oscars, cementing George’s reputation as a producer who wouldn’t try to wash out the grit. Sidney Lumet hired him to organize 12 Angry Men; Mike Nichols had him manage The Graduate; and he became a production executive at Paramount when the studio made Chinatown. Director Roman Polanski typecast him as Jack Nicholson’s trusted barber.

Valerie had been busy raising their daughter, Andrea, but ended up with a new career outside film. An errand to buy a rug for their apartment on the Upper East Side pulled her into the world of textiles. She became an expert on kilim rugs, flat-woven textiles made by women across the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Central Asia. She wrote a book, curated exhibitions, and turned herself into a dealer, traveling the world to ethically source pieces that she sold out of showrooms in Manhattan and Los Angeles.

Valerie Justin sold flat-woven rugs with a partner under the name The Pillowry. She later sold under the name Vanishing Textiles.
Photo: Provided by Susan Felleman

When the Justins retired to Sag Harbor, Valerie’s rugs ended up everywhere — on floors, over handrails, hanging on walls. And George’s movie posters decorated a downstairs study, where framed photos showed him with Kazan, Marlon Brando, and Paddy Chayefsky. Other walls showcased doll-size tribal figurines, Japanese woodblock prints, and a towering Robert Rauschenberg print. Picasso ceramics mixed with antique china. “The house was always dressed in the way she dressed herself — with an air of style,” remembered their nephew, John Felleman. “It was this incredibly eclectic collection of items that, to a huge extent, were the work of their friends. And I’m not sure in how many cases finding the work led to the friendship versus the friendship leading to the work.”

Waterston, the friend who helped them move in, was also a painter and whose artwork ended up on a 19th-century easel in the dining room. “At Valerie’s suggestion, we would barter beautiful textiles for paintings,” he recalled, a trade that ended up giving him an education in her field of study. And in Sag Harbor, Valerie stayed involved in the arts — active in the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the local film society, and perpetually running out to check on her neighbor, the painter Vija Celmins. “She was always getting invited to things,” remembered her niece, Susan Felleman. “She was a preternaturally engaged person, very curious, with wide-ranging interests.”

Valerie Justin in 2015 on the porch she restored.
Photo: Susan Felleman

George died in 2008 at 91 and Valerie died in 2023 at 97. Her will included an aside about her personal property — stipulating that “None of these items have intrinsic value. They are only valuable in their setting in this home.” To her nephew and executor, John Felleman, that felt a little untrue — some of the art objects were highly collectible. But it was also a little true: His aunt and uncle had a way of adding value to whatever they noticed — a Hoboken dock, an antique rug, an 1860 house. As Waterston remembered, Valerie “had an incredible way of taking an object that would seem uninteresting and all of a sudden it became this astounding thing.”

A developer who specializes in historic homes in the Hamptons saw the potential and bought last year from Justin’s estate. A major renovation updated electric and plumbing, added central air, rehabbed kitchens and baths, and refreshed every inch of old flooring. There’s now even a pool by the old barn, which is being marketed as a pool house or a home office. The fresh, new look makes it easier to see the strange little details that the Justins uncovered in 1995 — the rosettes and dentil moldings that revealed a Greek Revival in hiding. “He tried to keep all of that and he did,” said broker Linda Batiancela. “They’re just beautiful.”

The entryway. The banister and front door are original and were meticulously restored, says broker Linda Batiancela. “They didn’t mess around and put a modern door on or anything.”
Photo: Liz Glasgow/Town & Country Real Estate

The foyer opens into a living area and a downstairs study. The house was likely built in 1860, according to drawings by the architect Minard Lafever, per a 1996 article in the East Hampton Star.
Photo: Liz Glasgow/Town & Country Real Estate

“There are no other doors in Sag Harbor like these,” says Batiancela.
Photo: Liz Glasgow/Town & Country Real Estate

The Justins entertained in their open-plan kitchen, which was given a modern update with custom oak cabinetry and a Thermador range.
Photo: Liz Glasgow/Town & Country Real Estate

East & Home designed the interiors. The sink is Calacatta marble, and the walls get texture from a mineral-wash paint.
Photo: Liz Glasgow/Town & Country Real Estate

An upstairs bedroom looks out across the street toward an exceedingly quiet neighbor: a 19th-century cemetery that includes the graves of George Balanchine, Spalding Gray, William Gaddis, Gordon Matta-Clark, James Salter, and Lanford Wilson.
Photo: Liz Glasgow/Town & Country Real Estate

An upstairs bedroom. The house has four bedrooms and five bathrooms. The Justins each kept a study and turned the fourth room into a guest room.
Photo: Liz Glasgow/Town & Country Real Estate

A back patio replaced an old wooden deck where Valerie Justin could be found reading the newspaper. The new patio leads down to a brand-new pool.
Photo: Liz Glasgow/Town & Country Real Estate

The renovation remodeled an old barn, creating a back building 560 square feet and ideal for a quiet home office. “It’s very rare to have, on this size of property in the historic village, a house of this size with a pool and an accessory building of this size,” says Batiancela. Plus, “It’s not squeezed in to a tiny lot where there’s not an ounce of grass anywhere.
Photo: Liz Glasgow/Town & Country Real Estate