Farrell Companies Will Move Into Former BNB Headquarters

The Farrell Companies have purchased the Dime Community Bank building at the corner of Montauk Highway and Snake Hollow Road in Bridgehampton and plan to make the new building the firm’s headquarters as soon as it is renovated.

Founder Joe Farrell, who recently completed construction of a new headquarters for his expanding business a few blocks east on Montauk Highway, across from the Bridgehampton Post Office, said he couldn’t turn down the opportunity to buy “arguably the best piece of property in the Hamptons, period.”

“I just thought it was an incredible opportunity to put our brand on that building for the next 100 years,” he added.

He said he and Dime had been negotiating for about a year, ultimately agreeing on a $12.5 million purchase price.

Dime Community Bank, which was created by the merger of BNB Bank and Dime Community Bank in 2021, has its headquarters in Hauppauge, as BNB did before it, rendering the two-story colonial office building superfluous.

Dime will continue to lease space for a branch office in the building, according to Steve Miley, Dime’s chief marketing officer.

“Three years after the merger, we found the right buyer for the building,” he said, adding that Dime had a long business history with Farrell and made one of the conditions of the sale the right to lease a portion of the building. “Our presence in Bridgehampton is important to us,” he said.

Farrell said he would convert most of the building into office space for his real estate and construction businesses. He said he planned to renovate the basement of the building into a gym with a boxing ring, among other amenities, to be used by his employees.

Farrell built his first office building on the site of the former Elaine Benson Gallery. He has since leased that property to Greenberg Traurig LLP, a law firm. He said he would also lease his new office building, which is right next door.

Farrell’s effort to get a head start on the renovation project has run afoul of the Southampton Town Building Department, which issued a stop-work order for work being done without a building permit. Farrell said workers demolished portions of the interior of the bank building to identify where steel beams and other key structural components were located because they did not have a copy of the building’s blueprints to aid in their design of the new space. He said the issue was being rectified and that he expected the renovation to be completed within a year.

The building was originally constructed in the 1990s as a main office for the Bridgehampton National Bank, which had been founded by local merchants and farmers in 1910 and had been located in the building now home to Starbuck’s on the east end of the hamlet’s business district. The bank, which later changed its name to BNB after it became a state chartered commercial bank, eventually moved its main office to Hauppauge as its business expanded across Long Island.