Elegant Affairs Completes Remodel of 230 Elm

Caterer Elegant Affairs has completed its remodeling of the old Polish Hall on Elm Street in Southampton Village and expects to host its first event this fall.

The venue will still bear its most recent name, 230 Elm, though its appearance has been updated, inside and out.

Elegant Affairs founder and President Andrea Correale recently offered a walk-through of the space and her plans for it. She characterized the remodeling as a “major, major transformation.”

“We had to completely redo the whole front section of the building,” she said. “We built all new women’s rooms, men’s rooms, two additional bathrooms.”

The preexisting bar area was also updated, with the ceiling raised, and could be used again as a bar or as a spot for a deejay. The high-ceilinged main room has exposed wood beams and large chandeliers that pop against the newly painted black ceiling.

“It was, like, squatty and old,” Correale said of the venue. “It kind of looked like an old VFW hall before. So we had to get creative and think of a way of how we can kind of modernize it but give it some warmth at the same time.”

She said they went for a cool Hamptons vibe with “a little touch of barn, a little touch of beach, a little touch of modern comfort.”

Correale envisions the venue will host weddings, product launches, municipal events, nonprofit galas and holiday parties. “That’s really what it’s here for,” she said.

The space is also flexible for events of various sizes and configurations.

“We will be able to close the room off or make it one large room. So let’s say you want to have a cocktail party for 75 people — you can just use this portion of the space,” Correale said, gesturing to the portion of the hall closest to the main entry. “If you wanted to do a seated dinner for 150 people, you could have a cocktail hour on one side and then a dinner on the other side.”

She said for a big roaming cocktail party, which is popular for birthday parties and fundraisers, there could easily be up to 275 guests.

The redesign includes two brick-clad “feature walls,” one doubled-sided, several feet short of the ceiling and creating a buffer between the entry and the main ballroom, the other near the kitchen entrances.

Correale founded Elegant Affairs in 1995, when she was 16, and grew the company to provide off-premises catering services to Manhattan, Long Island and the Hamptons. The company’s main commissary is in Glen Cove, with a 10,000-square-foot warehouse and 8,000 square feet of kitchen and office space, and she has a kitchen, catering offices and a small venue on West 30th Street. Elegant Affairs also runs the cafe, bar and catering at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill.

The opening of 230 Elm is her company’s first large on-premises catering venue. “It’s big news for us,” she said. “We put a lot of time and effort into it.”

She said Elegant Affairs wants to do the right thing by local municipalities and support the community. She acknowledged there had been concerns in the neighborhood about what kind of neighbors the new 230 Elm would be, but said “everybody’s on great terms now.”

“We’re just looking forward to being good neighbors, and not just to the neighborhood here, but to the entire village and town of Southampton,” she said. “So we want to be able to do the firemen’s Christmas party and the police department’s Christmas party and be able to do anything that we can for the community because we want to be a part of it. And we want them to look at us as part of their Southampton family.”

The venue has a “hard shutdown” at 11 p.m., in accordance with noise ordinances, she said, and mandatory valet parking to control traffic and ensure guests don’t park in front of nearby homes.

The building’s downstairs bar, which had been known as 230 Down most recently, will not be reopening any time soon, but Correale said in a couple of years she will reassess. “We want to get our feet wet and get the operation going up here first,” she said.

Elegant Affairs’s first event at 230 Elm is scheduled for October, and Correale said they are beginning to book weddings for spring 2023. She described the venue as serving an upscale clientele, and more expensive, but not to the point where it’s not affordable.