The New Hamptons

Richard Meier and 33 other world-class architects have agreed to design single-family homes for a development in the Hamptons, the once idyllic Long Island summer playground where the rich, famous and the arrivistes they attract have increasingly competed to show how much bad taste money can buy. Meier, architect of the Getty Center and winner of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, is creative advisor for the Houses at Sagaponac, a project focused on design innovation and a return to moderation in home design.

Although the first of the homes won’t begin construction until next summer, the unusual project has the potential to be a what-if-you-gave-a-party-and-invited-the-best-and-the-brightest kind of experiment, which has never been attempted in this country in this way.

Real estate investor Harry J. Brown Jr., who’s known as Coco, made a great deal of money in the ‘80s, when Mulholland Estates was built on 188 acres of barren hilltop above Beverly Hills. He’s among the largest property owners in the Hamptons and seven years ago purchased 100 subdivided acres complete with building permits in Sagaponac, three miles from the beach. The lots are sized from 1 1/2 to 3 acres, and the completed homes will cost from $750,000 to $2.5 million, making them practically moderate priced housing, compared with the rest of the neighborhood. The houses, conceived as second residences, will range from 1,800 to 3,800 square feet. The size limitation constitutes a volley against the epidemic of size inflation that has infected luxury home building.

At Brown’s request, New York-based Meier has served as curator for the project, compiling an international list of architects known more for designing museums and other large public commissions than vacation retreats. “At first, I thought I’d invite young architects to participate, but then I felt it would be nice to include some friends of mine who hadn’t done houses before,” Meier says. “It’s become as much of a mix as we could possibly find, a diverse, creative group of excellent designers.”

The senior architects Meier recruited include former Harvard Graduate School of Design dean Harry Cobb, who’s in his mid-70s but has never designed a private home; Disney favorite Michael Graves; Charles Gwathmey, who designed the Guggenheim Museum addition in New York; Peter Eisenman, who designed the yet-to-be built Holocaust Museum in Berlin; James Ingo Freed, who designed the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.; and former UCLA School of Architecture dean Richard Rogers. At 37, the youngest architect in the group is South Africa-born Lindy Roy.

Five leading Los Angeles firms will contribute designs--Michael Rotondi and Clark Stevens of Roto Architects, Eric Owen Moss, Stephen Kanner of Kanner Architects, Craig Hodgetts and Hsin Ming Fung of Hodgetts & Fung, and Mark Mack of Mack Architects. All are working for slightly reduced fees, and no one Meier approached turned him down.

“When you get a letter from Richard Meier or Frank Gehry, any of the godfathers to our generation, you have to do what he asks,” says Michael Rotondi, 50, a former director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture for 10 years. (Gehry is not involved in the project.)

A number of the architects involved have expressed the hope that this development could serve as a model for future undertakings, providing a different approach to subdivision building.

“Whether this project measures up to its stated ideals, we’ll see,” says Moss, who designed several unconventional public buildings in Culver City. “But one of the nice things about it is it has stated ideals. Upper-middle income housing hasn’t had the participation of those who can be helpful to it. The broader lesson may have to do with developers who always look askance at breaking the system under which they continue to produce work. There’s a little bit of pioneering in this, but it’s sort of frugal pioneering. If you wanted to enlarge this to the Daly City’s or the Santa Claritas of the world, maybe we could make a dent in that picture or alter it.”

The brief presented to the architects stressed that budgets and size limitations be respected. The heavily wooded area is surrounded by hundreds of acres of county-owned land that can never be developed. To retain the character of the rural community, Brown urged that the home designs use natural materials that harmonize with the environment. In his communications with the architects, the developer has made it clear that although creativity is encouraged, he wants to build homes that will be livable.

“This isn’t patronage,” Hodgetts says. “It’s intended to be commercially viable. The architects involved have to be willing to work with less than their normal degree of freedom, because the houses have to be built in a more or less generic way. One of the de facto conditions is that you’re going to work your buns off to do something really great, because you don’t want to look like an idiot, considering the company that you’re in.

“Architects love to be in close proximity to other work that they admire. It’s wonderful to think that the people who live in a cluster of housing to some degree share concerns and have similarly adventurous taste. I like to think that the people who’d move into a place like this might be willing to push the envelope.”

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For most of the 20th century, selling houses was considered more important than pushing envelopes. As American cities grew, mass-produced rows of identical structures were considered a good answer to the demands of the industrial revolution. With postwar prosperity came suburban homogeneity, as subdivisions full of cookie-cutter houses blossomed beyond city centers. Later, in the ‘70s, a desire for individuality surfaced, and the house that looked like every other house was denigrated. Developers were careful to offer a variety of designs--house plan A, B, C or D--which often translated into the Mediterranean, the Tudor, the French chateau and the Colonial. They marketed homes with amenities most buyers wanted that could be built for a cost that guaranteed profits.

No one seemed eager to alter a formula that worked, at least in commercial terms. “Maybe developers don’t have much imagination. I really don’t know why. They know what they’re doing if they build subdivisions a certain way, and they know what the markup and the profits are going to be. What we’re doing is a risky operation, but it’s a chance. It could be that no one will buy these houses. Or it could be very successful. We don’t know at this point,” says Meier, who has not yet begun his Hamptons design.

Brown first thought about taking such a risk in Los Angeles, where he’d grown up as the son of Harry J. Brown, producer of most of Shirley Temple’s movies and onetime head of RKO Pictures. In the mid-’70s, Brown Jr. bought nearly 200 acres off Mulholland Drive for $1 million. A rattlesnake sanctuary and an occasional dumping ground for corpses, the land became a battleground between neighbors who wanted it to remain undeveloped and Brown, who initially wanted to divide it into 30 estates. He talked to his English friend Richard Rogers, then dean of the UCLA School of Architecture, about hiring talented architects to build spectacular houses. After years of court fights, Brown wound up with 130 lots, each of which he sold for more than he’d paid for the whole parcel.

“It was a profitable venture but not very satisfying artistically,” he says. “By the time we won the war, my aesthetic heart wasn’t in it. I sold my interest before the building there started.”

When he began visiting the Hamptons in the ‘60s, the conventional wisdom was that only property south of Highway 27, on the ocean side of the road that bisects the resort communities, was worth anything. “It seemed to me that north of the highway would be at least as desirable, eventually,” Brown says.

Brown bought the Sagaponac land at the end of the early ‘90s real estate recession. In an area that was once a haven for artists and writers, he watched Wall Street and Internet nouveau riche build 4,000- and 5,000-square-foot “beach cottages” only to see those homes quickly dwarfed by 10,000- and 20,000-square-foot mega mansions.

“The mansionization we’ve seen in Beverly Hills and the Hamptons is wrong from a number of perspectives,” he says. “It is aesthetically, emotionally and economically a disaster. And people make a terrible social mistake if they think getting a big house will impress anybody in the Hamptons. The whole place is full of wealthy and prominent people, and it takes more than a marble foyer to get attention.”

When he decided to develop the Sagaponac property, Brown returned to his idea of showcasing well-known architects. He says, “I don’t think that fine architecture should be limited to the very rich. It should be available to the upper middle class, as well. Part of the goal is to try to keep a kind of modesty and reality. What’s exciting to me is that each of these houses will be interesting, and they’ll all be different. I’m tired of the standardization of everything.”

Meier, who describes his role at this stage of the project as “a kibbitzer,” assigned architects to particular lots and tried to have architects with complementary sensibilities on adjacent sights. Brown will have final approval of the designs, with an eye toward practicality. “If we feel a design is not workable, or not good, we just won’t do it,” he says.

In the designs for the new project, a number of architects are creating houses with features that would appeal to part-time residents. “I think of the home I’ve designed almost as a large cabinet, that can open to let light and views in, or close when the owners are away,” says Kanner, who’s designed one of the larger houses on a three-acre site. “Because the property has so many trees, we’ve raised the house three feet up off the forest floor, so it will get more light, and large panels can slide away to create an open porch in summer.”

Since the homes are being designed for clients who don’t yet exist, architects are imagining how people would want to live and entertain in their vacation home. They’re creating flexible spaces that could accommodate a retired couple whose grandchildren might visit or a family with young children. What’s conspicuously absent from the mostly modern plans are the home gyms, discos, screening rooms and servants’ quarters that the area’s grander properties boast.