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A digital rendering of the proposed Peyton house and its planned landscaping on the hillside at 26 Jermain Avenue, overlooking the intersection of Jermain and Archibald Way in Sag Harbor. Architect Siyu Liu showed it at the May 26 meeting of the Historic Preservation and Architectural Review Board in an effort to counter the board’s concern that the house will be too imposing.
A standoff between a Sag Harbor review board and a property owner who wants to build a 29.5-foot-high house atop a rise of land overlooking Jermain Avenue, next to Mashashimuet Park, was headed into its next round this week.
Two members of the Board of Architectural Review and Historic Preservation have conducted a site visit of the property and the panel is expected to resume its public hearing on the case in the Municipal Building at 5 p.m. on June 23 for the first in-person session after many months of COVID-required Zoom sessions.
“It seems like all of a sudden we’re back to square one,” said property owner James Peyton on May 26, the last time the case was heard, after he and his architect had spent nearly an hour haggling over the height of his proposed 4,200-square-foot house and its planned hedges at 26 Jermain Avenue.
The proposed house would stand where a smaller cape-style house with a wide front porch is now located. It would be torn down.
Peyton said he was shocked at the board’s continued resistance, especially after believing things had gone well at the previous board session on May 12, when he noted that chairperson Jeanne Kane had been absent. The board then “recognized what we’d done,” he said, Peyton having reduced the height of the proposed house by a foot to just under 30 feet above grade.
Kane was back on May 26, reiterating her opposition along with board member Steve Williams, prompting Peyton to comment, “I don’t understand the path of the conversation. We feel it is not imposing,” he said of the house, and there are “plenty of neighbors who support” it.
“You have a towering house on a towering piece of land,” Williams said, adding that “it will dominate the area.”
“We love Sag Harbor,” Peyton said. “My son goes to school here. I’m a board member at the Children’s Museum. I’m going to be here a long time at this location. We paid good money to be here and I work hard … Tell me what I need to do …”
Williams and Kane both expressed frustration that Peyton and his architect, Siyu Liu, had not further reduced the height of the planned house beyond the 1 foot they proposed in April. At the time, Williams said he had been expecting a reduction of 2 to 4 feet. “Where’s the compromise?” he asked.
Instead, Peyton and Liu presented digital renderings of the finished house and its proposed landscaping based on Google Earth data that they argued accurately showed that the house would not be a towering presence.
Kane was skeptical. “The hill looks much flatter than what it actually is,” she said.
Liu rejected Williams’s past suggestion that the grade of the hill be reduced by 4 feet. She said it would require 250 dump-truck loads totaling 3,500 cubic yards or 4,900 tons of dirt to be carried away; and she argued it would ruin the setting, which she said is “gorgeous to me,” making an 8-foot-high retaining wall necessary to stabilize the higher terrain on the west side of the Peyton property at the edge of Mashashimuet Park.
After the board haggled with Peyton and Liu over the height of hedges planned in the rear of the property, Williams declared “the responsibility of our board is to support the proper administration of historic preservation and to keep a look in the village of Sag Harbor, what we call the Sag Harbor look. It’s not imposing, it’s very often somewhat casual …”
He asked rhetorically if “a stark white house on top of the hill” fits that look. “You’re really telling us that because you bought this piece of land, it constrains you from conciliating with the mission of the board,” he added.
“It sounds to me like you’re saying I’ve done nothing” to address the board’s concerns, “which is not the case,” Peyton replied.
“I didn’t say you’ve done nothing. I’m trying to say it’s not substantial.”
Kane added that “no one is saying … [you] haven’t worked hard to come up with ideas or options.” But the digital rendering showing the view from Jermain Avenue at its junction with Archibald Way “doesn’t really capture the height of the hill.” The combination of the elevation of the terrain and the height of the “house you propose are still overwhelming at this moment … It just doesn’t work.”
She rejected Peyton’s request for a poll of board members but agreed to his call for board members to come see the site. Liu asked that the entire board take part, but Kane noted the procedure for site inspections is to send two board members only.
The board tabled the case until its June 9 Zoom meeting but no one appeared to present the case so the board tabled it to the June 23 session, when the board will return to in-person meetings, Kane said.
Kane and Williams visited the property on June 6, after three members of the board and Zack Studenroth, the board’s historic architectural consultant, had “attended in stages a meeting at the house with the owners and the architect” on June 2, Kane replied by email in response to an inquiry. The members attending were Kane, Judith Long and Christian Cooney.
