Historic Mill Road House Has A Second Chance

For more than a decade, the circa-1885 house sitting quietly empty on 403 Mill Road in Westhampton has been nothing but a liability to its owners.

Despite being inconspicuous, the less than 1,000-square-foot, historic house—owned by Jim Mairs and Gina Webster—has had its share of disturbances. To be specific: four or five break-ins, the results of which left an entire room showered in carbon dioxide from an extinguisher after a group of kids lit a fire inside the house, as well as constant flooding. It was no small task to clean up.

The homeowners had had enough. The Manhattan-based husband and wife, who move into their home on an adjacent Baycrest Avenue property every summer, decided that the Mill Road house needed to go.

And at this point, their only option was to knock it down, Mr. Mairs said.

It was a painful conclusion to come to, he said, because while he loved the house, it couldn’t support itself with a rental income.

But recently, against all odds, the couple changed their decision. The reason: financial help from an “unidentified source,” Mr. Mairs said, which will help him restore the house to its original condition, just as he did with its next door neighbor—405 Mill Road.

“I did not rob a bank,” Mr. Mairs said of his newly acquired donation during a telephone interview last week. “I had already restored one house, so I guess I proved that I should be able to do it again.”

In 1997, Mr. Mairs—publisher of Quantuck Lane Press in Manhattan—purchased both Mill Road properties behind the couple’s pair of Baycrest Avenue homes for $265,000. The two Mill Road houses, which were termite infested and had dry-rot, sat untouched until two years ago, when Mr. Mairs stripped down 405, also known as the Gordon House. Restoring, insulating, rewiring and reshingling the home took three months, the owner said, and cost $100,000. Number 403, also known as the Enoch Pierson House, will be a bigger endeavor, according to Mr. Mairs.

He estimates his new project, which is in much worse shape than his first, will run $50,000 more—at the very least—to get it looking nearly the way it did more than a century ago. Records show that the house at 403 Mill Road was constructed in the late 1880s for Civil War veteran Enoch Pierson and his family during a period of expanding settlement around the Westhampton community.

“These houses from the 19th century were ubiquitous,” Mr. Mairs said. “I think they were made from plans you could probably get from Sears Roebuck, put up by journeymen builders. They weren’t done by name architects. They were poor men’s houses, and that’s part of the East End that’s vanishing. It doesn’t matter how small the piece of land is. If a home like this is sold, it’s torn down. It’s practically axiomatic.”

One section of the house will be demolished: a 24-foot-by-20-foot addition, built on in the 1970s, that “ruined the configuration of the rooms,” Mr. Mairs said. He estimates the renovation will begin in the fall.

Once the wing is torn off, the basement built underneath will be filled in, he explained. The house will be stripped and prepped for insulation, new wiring and plumbing.

“We need to clear it out, too,” Mr. Mairs said. “It’s been a parking place for junk for the last couple of years.”

The mold damage from the flooding will be abated, he said. Heating and electrical systems will be installed, he added, as well as new double-glazed windows to control drafts.

The sides will be freshly shingled, and the two Mill Road houses—which he plans on renting—will create a matching pair. The old windows will be given to the Westhampton Beach Historical Society for its restoration of the Foster-Meeker Homestead, an 18th-century Cape Cod-style house that was previously located just west of Turkey Bridge on Main Street in the village. The building, which was donated to the Historical Society, was moved next to the group’s Tuttle Hill House Museum on Mill Road in 2008.

“I can’t stand to see anything thrown away if it has a function and it has historic value,” Mr. Mairs said. “These homes have a charm. I love the little 19th century workman’s houses. They appeal to me a great deal. They’re simple, not ornate, usually positioned fairly well in respect to the sunlight, and they were built before central heating, so they had to be smart in the way they were constructed. Similar houses are disguised by many additions and alterations. But fewer and fewer are still standing.”

When complete, the Enoch Pierson House will weave itself into the historical fabric of old homes on the East End, Westhampton Beach Historical Society President Bob Murray explained during a telephone interview last week.

It is a tapestry that is rapidly deteriorating, he emphasized.

“We don’t have much of that fabric left in the Westhampton area,” he said. “So many houses have been torn down. We lost the Raynor House on the corner of South Road and Apaucuck Point Road. That was a classic farmhouse and that was torn down four, five years ago. And that was sad. So it’s good to see when we can restore something, or if somebody wants to restore it, that fabric will remain.”

Sally Spanburgh, the chairperson of the Southampton Town Landmarks and Historic Districts Board, echoed Mr. Murray’s sentiments, and added that the restoration of 403 Mill Road also provides an excellent teaching moment.

“The Town Landmarks Board was very pleased to learn about their plans,” Ms. Spanburgh wrote of Mr. Mairs’ and Ms. Webster’s upcoming efforts in an email on Thursday. “The entire community can learn about the benefits of historic preservation firsthand by witnessing the rehabilitation of this property, and ideally that action would prompt similar endeavors by others.”