Norman Jaffe’s 1977 House for Sportscaster Jack Whitaker

A listing photo shows the unfussy exterior of a 1977 Norman Jaffe house. A shingled wall (right) hides a bamboo garden and patio so expertly that it nearly blends with the façade.
Photo: Sotheby’s International Realty

When Norman Jaffe set up his practice in Bridgehampton, he built unconventional houses for unconventional New Yorkers. Jack Whitaker, one of those clients, was a sportscaster known for an elegant and erudite style. (His golf commentary could include a mention of “Henry V’s camp at the Battle of Agincourt,” and he opened coverage of a marathon with the line, “Let’s follow these butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers, these grandmothers and truck drivers and lawyers and teachers, as they run through this urban landscape and brighten it up for just a few moments.”) Whitaker didn’t want a boring beach house, so he turned to Jaffe, a fellow New Yorker who had worked for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Philip Johnson before falling for Bridgehampton and building chunky, geometric forms that rose from its potato fields and dune grass.

Like other Jaffe houses, the home designed for Whitaker is built around a high-ceilinged great room, but it doesn’t feel cavernous and cold, thanks to warm honey-colored exposed wood and a human feel to how the rooms unfold, with no long hallways or closed stairwells. (Jaffe’s homes felt like hideaways, giving clients “warmth and intimacy, not full exposure and the laboratory-style living of hard-edged modernism,” wrote the critic Alastair Gordon.) A shingled wall off the driveway blends into the shingled exterior, hiding a bamboo garden and sliding glass doors that lead inside. A gently sloping roof caps a great room lit by a sliver of skylight and more sliding doors to the back deck. Off to one side is a den that leads out to another deck, and on the other side of the house is the kitchen with a working fireplace. Whitaker nicknamed the place Sparrow Hall, a reference to a medieval saint’s proverb about a sparrow who flies over a royal banquet, feeling only a brief moment of warmth. “It’s the story of life,” Whitaker told the Southampton Press. It may also have been the story of the house — a cozy weekend respite from the stress of a Manhattan newsroom.

A listing photo of an open stairway shows Jaffe’s ability to carve up interior spaces without relying on dark hallways. Rooms seem to unfurl naturally — with a kitchen and bedrooms off to the left in this image, and a den and great room to the right.
Photo: Sotheby’s International Realty

The home was finished in 1977, just as Jaffe was gaining a new level of fame that would prove to be a curse. An AIA award and an Architectural Record book featuring a series of his vacation escapes brought wealthy clients more likely to push Jaffe around than to trust his vision. The homes changed — getting “grander, splashier, and in a number of cases almost bombastic and not a little vulgar,” according to the critic Paul Goldberger. Jaffe agreed, calling the mansions “pig-outs,” as his son Miles Jaffe later told reporters. Jaffe died in 1993 at 61, after he went for a morning swim and was never seen again. Police called it an accidental drowning, but his son called it suicide. He was buried outside the Jewish synagogue he designed in 1988.

As McMansions took root in the potato fields, some of Jaffe’s homes were demolished. But the Whitaker house is mostly untouched. The sportscaster and his wife, the tennis champion Nancy Chaffee, only added a putting green before they sold in 2002 to Mark and Wendy Biderman, who had been coming to the Hamptons for decades. The Bidermans loved Jaffe’s work, their broker said, and didn’t want to live anywhere “typical” or “cookie-cutter,” as Mark told Newsday in 2021. And they certainly didn’t want something gaudy. “The wood and colors made it feel like a home, not a showpiece,” said Mark.

A listing photo of an airy living space shows the warmth of Jaffe’s designs — modern but never cold.
Photo: Richard Taverna

Still, if anyone was looking for a Jaffe showpiece, they might have bought this house. It has the same DNA as the 1977 house that won Jaffe a major award and stands out for its long, sloping roof that seems to nearly hit the ground, creating a pyramidal silhouette. When the Bidermans bought it, they planned a small addition — a fourth bedroom above a new garage. Their broker, Beate V. Moore, has sold two other Jaffe houses and spent enough time in the catalogue to know where Jaffe is out of step with today’s buyer: smaller, darker bedrooms. Moore says that’s the opposite at 95 Jobs Lane, where one of the grandest spots is the primary suite — which sits at the top of the house, under the high ceilings of its peaked roof, and has a terrace that spans the length with a view of the backyard and the pool.

A listing photo of a sunlit sitting room shows sliding doors that open onto a mahogany deck.
Photo: Richard Taverna

Mark Biderman told Newsday that the family bought the house as a retreat to enjoy with their children and grandchildren, but they ended up living there full-time during the pandemic. It gave them a chance to see how drastically the area had changed, as Wendy Biderman wrote in 27 East. But “as things around us changed, we tried not to.” Work on the house mostly consisted of keeping out the weather. Moore, their broker, listed all their fixes, including a new roof and new shingles. “They maintained it beautifully,” he says.

A listing photo shows how the wide back deck looks over a pool and a putting green. A side deck (left) includes a strip of roof that makes it easy to move a dining table in or out of the sun.
Photo: Sotheby’s International Realty

A listing photo of a living room shows vaulted ceilings and skylights that fill the space with natural light.
Photo: Richard Taverna