A Golden Pond House

The important artists who have populated the Hamptons since the 1800s include William Merritt Chase, Fairfield Porter, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner … and Edward Simmons. Okay, you may not have heard of the last one, but thanks to it being for sale, the house he built in 1900 can be seen for the work of art it is.

Known as the Pond House because of its proximity to Georgica Pond in East Hampton, the 12,000-square-foot mansion on a shade under 2 acres has been listed via Compass for $28,950,000. It was designed for Simmons by Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White, the foremost architecture firm of its day. (A notorious lothario, White would be killed in 1906 by a lover’s husband, and even worse, be portrayed by Norman Mailer in the film version of E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime.”)

The residence contains seven bedrooms and eight baths (with hand-carved, heated bathtubs), hand-carved stone fireplaces, parquet de Versailles floors, and a wall of windows overlooking the pond. The property has 200 feet of pond frontage and is next to 17 acres of meadow preserved by the Nature Conservancy.

So who was Edward Simmons and how did he end up with such a neat house? He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1852, and at 22 he graduated from Harvard College. He became an Impressionist painter mostly known for large murals, and his first commission was to create murals for the Municipal Arts Society. Subsequent mural projects were done for the Criminal Courthouse at 101 Centre Street in Manhattan, Waldorf Astoria Hotel, and Library of Congress. He belonged to a group known as the Ten American Painters as well as the Society of American Artists. Simmons turned his hand to writing, producing an autobiography in 1922, “From Seven to Seventy,” and died nine years later.

The Pond House is one of his most enduring works. The manse was renovated by Jeffrey Colle in 2005, as was the 1,800-square-foot guest cottage on the property. The project included rotating it to take full advantage of the view of Georgica Pond. And if the pond is not enough, no worries, there is a 25-by-45-foot pool and spa available.