Building Southampton School District Had Eyed For Offices Has A Long History

The approximately 125-year-old Southampton Village landmark housed a sea captain and his descendants, as well as sick people prior to construction of Southampton Hospital. It served as a restaurant under various owners and was converted to office space by an insurance agency in 1986.

Most recently, Southampton School officials had hoped to use the 15,000-square-foot space for district offices—until a proposal to spend $7.75 million to buy it was shot down by voters last week.

The building at 300 Hampton Road—today a hybrid of classic mansard facade and modern glass office building to the rear—has quite the history. The late Peter Paul Muller, the Southampton architect hired to design the 10,000-square-foot two-story glass addition, had met with the Press in 1986 to discuss it.

The building was designed in the mansard style named for a 17th-century French architect, Nicolas Francois Mansart, who popularized the sharply pitched mansard roof. Such roofs were initially designed to make a three-story house look like a two-story one to deceive the tax collector, who assessed a home on the basis of the number of floors as well as the number of rooms.

The land beneath the building had been purchased in 1873 by Captain C. Goodale, but the house was not built until around 1890 and for years was known as the Goodale House.

In the winter of 1908-09, two rooms in the home, owned at the time by the captain’s son, Stephen Goodale, were rented by the newly formed Southampton Hospital Association. However, the number of patients grew so quickly that the association purchased a separate building on Little Plains Road and Meetinghouse Lane the following year.

In the years that followed, the house changed hands a few more times. In 1916, Jay Vanderveer purchased the building, and in the 1930s Egbert Burnett of Water Mill took it over. Mr. Egbert’s daughter, Myra Burnett, opened up a boardinghouse called the Mansard Inn, and later a restaurant called “Myra’s Kitchen.”

In 1940, the building was designated by Southampton Town as a local historic landmark.

After ownership changed again several times beginning in the 1970s, the building eventually fell into disrepair. In 1986, a local insurance company—Maran Debaun Cruise & Simonson—bought the property and hired Mr. Muller to try to preserve it and design a new office building.

The project received approval from the Village Board of Architectural Review and the Zoning Board of Appeals, which granted the developers a variance from a regulation that requires a 50-foot buffer between an office district and a residential zone.

At the time, Mr. Muller said that preserving and incorporating the facade of the old building into the new structure—trying to preserve the original look and at the same time meet current fire codes—presented a challenge that eventually increased the cost of the $800,000 project to more than $1 million. The engineers had to move the original building, replace its foundation, and return the structure to its resting place. The entire interior of the old building was gutted and rebuilt with steel studs, concrete floors and Sheetrock.

Thirty years later, Southampton School District officials announced that they were interested in purchasing the property for $7.6 million, but the purchase was rejected, 575-418, on Tuesday, May 17.

And so, the property at 300 Hampton Road is still on the market. Attempts to reach the current owners, Morley Property Management Inc. of Southampton, were not immediately successful. The Cook Maran & Associates insurance brokerage still has its Southampton office in the building.