Feb 20, 2017 10:17 AM

Who was Grosvenor Atterbury, you ask? Okay, you didn’t ask, but we’ll inform you anyway, and you might enjoy his story and its relevance to real estate.

Mr. Atterbury was born in Detroit but, like so many others, it was in New York that he found fame in his field, which was architecture and urban planning. He attended Yale University, traveled in Europe, then came to New York to study at Columbia University. He had the good fortune to be hired by McKim, Mead & White, the premier architecture firm of its day, headlined by Stanford White, whose resume includes the arch at Washington Square, the second Madison Square Garden—where he was murdered, but not because of any design complaints—and several summer homes on the South Fork. Mr. Atterbury was given assignments to design weekend retreats for wealthy businessmen in Connecticut, Massachusetts, upstate New York, Maine, and inevitably the Hamptons. One of his innovations was to construct parts of dwellings offsite and truck them to where the residence was being built. It could be said that he first grasped the concept of modular housing.

Mr. Atterbury got around to creating an estate for himself, in Southampton. (He died there at the ripe old age of 87.) The immediate relevance is that via the Douglas Elliman firm, the estate’s carriage house has just been put on the market, with an ask of $940,000.

This is not just a glorified barn to keep your horse in. Mr. Atterbury’s carriage house, constructed in the early 1900s, is a 3,300-square-foot, two-story home on 1 acre with water access to both Shinnecock Bay and the ocean. Inside are 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, 13-foot ceilings, and the original wood-beamed ceilings, hardwood floors, and even the barn doors. Glass doors open to a rear terrace and an in-ground pool.

Also part of the carriage house’s unique history is that it was once part of an Mr. Atterbury compound—a main house plus a studio and two homes he built for visiting friends.