A Mid-'80s Modern in Bridgehampton Gets a Makeover

We’ve all heard the story before. A perfectly nice house gets sold to a new owner, who says it’s just what he wanted. But only minutes after the closing, the demolition crew is warming up the bulldozer, ready to knock it into a pile of framing wood, insulation, drywall and other debris to be carted away by a series of 40-yard rolloff containers.

But that’s not the case with 325 Mitchell Lane in Bridgehampton, which is currently on the market for $5.99 million. Longtime residents of the hamlet remember it: A 1980s-era modern house on the east side of the road, completely finished in white, with large, trapezoidal windows that couldn’t be opened and thick vertical blinds in the windows that often were closed.

In 2016, when the house was last sold, Robert Young, a New York City-based architect, was hired to help the new owner make a decision: Should it go or should it stay?

The house was typical of the cookie-cutter approach to modern architecture of the mid-1970s to mid-1980s that Young blames on too many architects knocking out poor imitations of the Amagansett summer home of the architect Charles Gwathmey.

The Mitchell Lane house “was what I call ‘refrigerator modern,’” Young said. “It’s not human. Whites can be nice, of course, but this was all the same. It had no human quality and was not very welcoming.”

While the house was potentially a teardown, Young saw something worthwhile in its construction. “As an architect, I try to save these things whenever possible,” he said, adding that sometimes, a project reaches “a tipping point,” where it is no longer cost-effective to work with the original design and the decision has to be made to raze the existing house and start from scratch.

“This particular house had good bones,” Young said. “It’s just a matter of looking at things for what they need to be. If you try to be objective about it, it’s not an automatic teardown.”

The original layout was reminiscent of a farmstead — it had three related barnlike structures. “It had the kind of layout my client wanted in terms of how they wanted the rooms laid out, where the bedrooms were, with a separate area for guests and hangout areas,” he said.

Most of the work was cosmetic, he added, with cedar shingles replacing clapboard and various tweaks to the design to make it look like a new house. Major changes including flipping the master bedroom from the front of the house to the rear, where it looks out over the pool and gardens, replacing a curved stairway and balcony in the living room to provide higher ceilings, and the removal of a swimming pool surrounded by white decking attached to the house and its replacement with one in the backyard.

“It wasn’t that big a deal,” Young said of the project. “We’d didn’t have to change any major structures in order to do it.”

The renovation, which included interior design work by Damon Liss Design and exterior spaces handled by landscape architect Christopher LaGuardia, was largely completed by 2017.

The house, which has about 3,200 square feet of living space, has four bedrooms, three full baths, and two half-baths. The house includes a chef’s kitchen, a fireplace in the living room, and approximately 1,500 square feet of outdoor living space, including a barbecue area and firepit.

The property is listed by the CeeJack team at Compass.