Not Quiet On The Western Front

Lately, we’ve been reporting on the $150 million ask and properties in Water Mill changing hands in eight-figure transactions. But things are as hot as the weather west of the Shinnecock Canal too.

We hear from Saunders & Associates that it has sold for $12.2 million a historic property located at 119 Dune Road in Westhampton Beach, listed at $16,900,000. The property was once the home of the late Donald Pels, a pioneer in the wireless and communications industry and a former American Broadcast Company executive, and Wendy Keys, a former executive producer for the Film Society of Lincoln Center. (Regular readers might recall that we wrote about Ms. Keys’s background in March 2016, after having just purchased a house in Wainscott.) The Westhampton Beach property consists of a 5.1-acre, 7,000-square-foot beachfront compound built in 1909.

Designed by prominent architect J. Sarsfield Kennedy—known for the famous Gingerbread House in Bay Ridge and the Picnic House in Prospect Park—the shingle-style house on Dune Road is reminiscent of elements of both a European villa and Craftsman-style design. A long curving driveway leads to the home, where a fieldstone porte cochere opens to the columned front porch. Overlooking the ocean, the 15-room house contains 8 bedrooms, 6 full and 2 half baths, panoramic ocean views from many large windows, and a private boardwalk to the beach. Other features include beamed ceilings, fireplaces, bay windows with banquette seating, beautiful woodworking, convivial spaces for gathering and entertaining, a heated pool and spa, and a pool house that can be used as a billiard room and lounge.

The dwelling was one of the few homes to survive the Hurricane of 1938, which produced a destructive tidal wave. As referenced in a 1938 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the architect, Kennedy, noted that when he visited after the hurricane he found the home in “first-class condition,” the results of design work that he deemed preventive and precautionary. These extraordinary design features would later be standard techniques used in houses built in similar settings.

In nearby Quogue, there were four sales in one week reported. The most robust one was 5 Club Lane for $4,225,000. This 5,000-square-foot manse, originally constructed in 1936, has 7 bedrooms, 6.5 baths, 5 fireplaces, a home office, formal dining room, and outside, a heated pool. The buyer is Martin G. McGuinn. Nope, he’s not related to Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, but he was the CEO of the Bank of New York Mellon Financial Corp., one of the world’s biggest banks.

Other sales in the Village of Quogue include the casually named 34 Quogo Neck Lane, for $2,850,000 (could the new co-owner, Ricki Reisner, be the same Ricki Reisner with the special effects company Industrial Light and Magic?); 25 Jessups Landing Court West, for $1,769,911; and a neighbor, 29 Jessups Landing Court West, for &1,392,825.

And there was an intriguing flurry of activity on Rady Lane in East Quogue, where a total of 12 vacant parcels were purchased by M&M Property Managment LLC, all at the same price: $283,334. Presumably, there is a subdivision in that street’s future.