New Owner Wants To Replace a Once Controversial Sag Harbor House

A Federal-style house on Bay Street that was controversial when it was brought before the Sag Harbor Village Board of Historic Preservation and Architectural Review in 1995 will be replaced by a large traditional house that may prove to be just as controversial.

Richard Pantina, the property’s owner, wants to raze the gray stucco townhouse that the author and journalist Kenneth Love built three decades ago just west of the entrance to Havens Beach.

When Love proposed his house, critics said that while it reflected the design of some buildings in the village, including the L’Hommedieu house at the corner of Main Street and Bayview Avenue, it was out of place in that neighborhood.

Pantina has proposed a traditional house for the site, but one that would be much larger than many others in the neighborhood, in keeping with the trend of homeowners proposing ever larger houses.

Pantina’s architect, Mehran Talaie of Studio B+M Architecture of Hauppauge, first appeared before the board last fall, and he was asked to scale back his initial plans.

He said he had reduced the length of the house along the street from 102 to 89 feet and reduced the width from 37 feet to just under 28 feet. He said he had modified the design to be “more of a neighborhood-friendly version.”

But the board’s historic preservation consultant, Zach Studenroth, had his concerns.

He suggested the Mehran Talaie should do “a comparative presentation of what that neighborhood is,” adding, “That tends to be a street with more modest houses.”

Dave Harvey, the board’s architectural consultant, also had concerns. “It’s somewhat suburban in nature,” he said. “It doesn’t have the volume and massing of historic houses.”

He suggested that the existing house, once considered out of place, would be less out of place than the one now being proposed to replace it.

“It’s in the historic district, and it looks like it could be in Massapequa,” added board member Judith Long. “It’s just very suburban. We’d like something that looked like it was in Sag Harbor, not suburbia.”

“Sag Harbor has a unique look. People tell us it’s beautiful, they really like it — and then they come to us with a presentation that is not consistent with the character of Sag Harbor at all,” said the board’s chairman, Steve Williams, before the board tabled the discussion. “We are asking the architects and the owners to conform with the feeling that they fell in love with and to make it consistent, and not to do something that is alien to the area.”

Matt Ivans of Suffolk Environmental Consulting recalled that when Love built his house “it was neighbor versus neighbor.”

He said he would be willing to do an analysis to show how the proposed new house would blend in, but that he wasn’t sure it would sway the board’s opinion.

“To me, the best thing in the world for Bay Street is to get rid of that house,” he said.