Hamptons Homes Are Advertising Hot Spots

Earlier this summer, international producer Cindi Blair popped her flier into every mailbox along Dune Road from West Hampton Dunes to Hampton Bays, making a point not to discriminate among any of the cozy, contemporary cottages and massive, modern manses.

She never knows what her clients will want, she explained during a telephone interview last week from her Manhattan office. And as a location scout, it’s her job to deliver.

During her 18-year history with Cindi Blair Productions, she has organized “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds” of photo and television commercial shoots around the world, she said, from Sweden and Germany to the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Yet only a fraction of them have been shot in the Hamptons, whether on the white sand beaches, at local community landmarks—including the Parrish Art Museum and Coopers Beach in Southampton, Ms. Blair said—or inside some of the swankiest homes the area has to offer.

She’s looking to change that.

Two months ago, the producer began growing her East End location library—particularly west of the Shinnecock Canal—with one goal in mind: to see Hamptons beaches and houses featured in glossy advertisements and television commercials, seamlessly fitting in with the thousands of internationally syndicated advertising campaigns shot at other celebrated destinations across the globe.

“Being in so many beautiful places and homes around the world, I know they’re in my backyard in the Hamptons, so I’m going to make it easy on myself,” the Westhampton resi-

dent laughed. “I think people are curious how it works. A lot of these homes are not used, so to go in for a day and have a photo shoot there, it’s a nice way [for homeowners] to make a lot of money in one day. And, also, people like the fact that they’ve just been in, maybe, a J. Crew ad. They can open up a magazine and say, ‘That photo shoot was at my house.’ It’s to show how beautiful their house is.”

Beauty, however, is in the eye of the advertiser—whether it be Victoria’s Secret or Lord & Taylor, both of whom have shot with Ms. Blair on the East End, she said. There’s never a cookie-cutter mold while location hunting, the producer said, and she is very rarely turned off by a house—whether it be a shack, a mansion or something in between.

Ms. Blair has shot at houses on stilts, houses built into cliffs, houses in never-ending fields, she said. The home could be anywhere from a 500-square-foot cottage to a 10,000-square-foot estate home. The shoot could require a bathroom, a large closet, a kitchen, a bedroom, a pool or an arborvitae along a driveway.

Maybe the client just needs a walkway to the beach, or a dock overlooking the water—such as the one near Ms. Blair’s home on Pleasant Avenue, where her husband, Michael Dwornik, shot an editorial spread, “Dreamers,” for the art magazine Tokion. It was done three years ago during the first weekend the couple moved into their house, Ms. Blair said, which is 90 minutes from the couple’s apartment on the Upper East Side.

“The Hamptons are film-friendly for us, and it’s so close to the city,” she said. “Everything that we can get in New York City we can get here, but the locations are different. People are coming out there to shoot at that beautiful pool that looks out onto the water or they’re looking for the clean, open space where you get sun, sky, sand, or maybe they’re looking for that super contemporary Hamptons house or the very modern house. Some clients started coming to me in the last couple years asking for these locations, and the things they were asking me for were basically five blocks from where I live.”

Personally, Ms. Blair’s taste tends to be a bit more modern, she said, and her favorite homes are “just so clean and over the top with views that are so absolutely stunning,” she said.

“Last year, I was shooting in Sweden in this amazing, modern glass house right outside Stockholm,” she recalled. “And, literally, they had just finished shooting ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,’ and we went in two days later. It was amazing. I couldn’t wait for the movie to come out to be, like, ‘I was in the same house as in the movie!’”

When homeowners see their houses in national advertisements, Ms. Blair expects them to have similar reactions to hers, she said, especially after they’ve been paid, on average, between $1,000 and $10,000 a day to rent out their residences for a shoot.

“It’s really worth their while if they’re interested in making money,” she said. “There are so many houses I see when we’re driving around. I’d love to go up to some of these homes and knock on people’s doors. But I don’t want to scare them, either,” she laughed.

About two years ago, Ms. Blair and Mr. Dwornik were traveling down Dune Road, having just returned from a photo shoot on Sylt, an island and tourist location off the northern coast of Germany. As the couple neared Quogue and the dunes, Mr. Dwornik had a revelation.

“He said, ‘You know what? We could have done it here,’” Ms. Blair said of the photo shoot. “‘It’s just beautiful. Why did we have to go to Germany?’ And he’s right. We could have done it here. There’s just so much potential, and I’m looking to grasp that potential.”

For more information, visit cindiblairproductions.com.