Five-Star Hotels in the Hamptons

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History and money are familiar bedfellows in Hamptons residential real estate: Even an imperfect piece of the past costs a pretty present penny. It’s a different story on the hotel side, where the twain hardly ever bed down. Classic luxury accommodations in historic buildings are rare on the East End, which is why the Hamptons has been saddled with that hyphenated-adjective “hotel-starved” for so long. (True, there are renovated motor courts with Frette sheets, but that’s more retro-chic than five-star.)

This year that distasteful descriptor comes a step closer to retiring with the opening of Topping Rose House, an 1842 Greek Revival mansion in Bridgehampton. (The fact that the effort took eight years to come to fruition tells you why such hotels are so scarce out here.) With Topping Rose in the mix, there’s now a trio of Hamptons properties where history and money have coupled to create hotels at a Relais & Châteaux level. Here’s how each plays on the past in its quest for a present perfect.

TO THE MANOR BORN
The 22-room luxury inn Topping Rose House adds cachet to Bridgehampton.

“I have always liked the juxtaposition of something edgy with something soft,” Alexandra Champalimaud, who designed the interiors of Topping Rose House, told the Financial Times this past January. She was referring to her fashion sense—black leather leggings from The Row, feminine blouse, sharply tailored blazer—but as she quickly confirmed in our interview, it’s her design sensibility in a nutshell. Which is why the rooms at Topping Rose have a Windsor chair (but painted black) at a midcentury trumpet-pedestal side table in real marble.

Juxtaposition is the thread that defines Topping Rose House, a 22-room luxury compound in Bridgehampton. It consists of the 1842 Greek Revival Topping Rose House, named for its original owner, Judge Abraham Topping Rose; a small addition; a 19th-century barn turned event space; and a L-shaped new complex that houses the spa and 15 “cottage” guest rooms.

“Everybody came out of the woodwork,” says Roger Ferris, the head of Roger Ferris + Partners, who designed the architecture and shepherded the project down the Via Dolorosa of approvals required. He’s referring to the cast of government officials, preservationists, historicists, and “not in my backyard” Hamptonites who sprang to life when it became known that Bill Campbell, a Hamptons resident and senior adviser to Jamie Dimon, CEO and Chairman of JPMorgan Chase, had bought the property and planned to turn it into a luxury hotel. (Simon Critchell, the former head of Cartier North America, and Tom Colicchio, who is in charge of the hotel and restaurant, are also partners now.)

Irony abounded, starting with Campbell’s interest in the place, which was sparked by the fact that “the property was grandfathered for a spa, restaurant, and hotel.” He was proposing exactly what the town seemed to want. The zoning itself is the result of 1970s horse-trading—"so it wouldn’t become a gas station,” says Campbell laughing. And Topping Rose House was on the verge of falling down by the time work began.

Ferris knows his architectural history—he talks fluently about façade punctuation (that’s doors and windows to the layperson) and proportion, and though emphatically modern, his designs reference classical architecture. See those 24-foot-high portals that punctuate the new construction? Now think of the Arc de Triomphe or the Arch of Constantine, and you’ll understand where he’s coming from.

Ferris built Campbell’s coalition of the willing by periodically getting the various constituencies in a room. “The restoration of the inn was not a difficult sell,” says Ferris. It was the small addition to the right—which houses an elevator and fire stair, neither of which could be worked into the original building—that caused a war. On one side were the architectural preservationists, intent on copying the style of the main house down to the last dentil. On the other was the Southampton Architectural Review Board, which wanted something modern but harmonious.

In the end, it came down to one word in the National Park Service guidelines for historical renovation: referential. Additions shouldn’t be copies, but there should be a familial resemblance, and they shouldn’t be attached to the original. It was hard for the purists to go against that. But of course you can’t ask guests to go outside to take an elevator. “Glass-hyphenated slits,” eight-foot- wide Starfire glass panels between the original building and the addition embody the peace treaty that Ferris finally struck, by underscoring the separation, but allowing for a sheltered passage from the main building to the elevators.

“The idea was to dematerialize the façade of the new buildings,” says Ferris, referring to the key design element, horizontal louvers that run from ground to roof on two sides. On the other two, fiberglass-laced cement slats, colored and baked to allude to weathered wood, float off the glass walls—“a veil,” says Ferris, who likes layering. (The louvers are also a privacy-screen.) In addition, Ferris moved and added to the barn on the property, placing it between the main-house addition and the new wing “to moderate the transition from the formality of the house to the dematerialized form.”

The rooms show off Champalimaud’s deft way with historical allusion, with the main-house rooms more traditional (iron four-poster beds, historically inspired bedside tables) and the cottage rooms done in a groovier dialect (cooler color scheme, platform bed, live-edge wood furniture). But even the main-house rooms have new coffee tables of white lacquered cubes. “It all feels good together, but it’s not perfectly matching—it feels like home,” says Champalimaud. 1 Bridgehampton–Sag Harbor Tpk., Bridgehampton, 537-0870; toppingrosehouse.com

HAMPTONS HIDEAWAY
The Inn at Windmill Lane is a stalwart getaway nestled within Amagansett.

This Amagansett property is a séance, a shingle-style mansion with muscular chimneys and eave and eyebrow windows called up through a combination of historical passion and very deep pockets.

The property is gorgeous. Sure, there are online mutterings about the lack of a pool, but that’s not because the owners are cheap—one look at the spacious marbled bathrooms will tell you that—but because their hands were tied by the past. They were only allowed to build on the footprint of the original building. That’s why reception is in what looks like a tollbooth up from the end of the driveway, and why there’s a vast lawn that could hold an Olympic-size pool, but is used for weddings.

That being said, the owners expensively embroidered the property where they could. See that regimental line of liriodendron trees along the brick walk? They were brought in.

And the rooms are beautiful, even the smallest double, which in the main house comes to 615 square feet. (In the main house, suite 5 is the most popular because of its vaulted ceilings.) The team wanted everything to be “timeless,” according to their very attentive concierges—and it shows. The bathrooms throughout are a lavishly expensive play of tiles and fittings, and the walk-in closets have built-in dressers.

The architect, Nicholas Botta, used wainscoting and molding throughout to create interiors that have the simplicity of a Shaker meetinghouse, but somehow come across as luxurious, not austere. That’s especially apparent in the three cottages at the back of the property, where you can wake up to clerestory window mullions boldly shadowed on a white arched embrasure. It made me say a prayer of thanks for being here. 23 Windmill Lane, Amagansett, 267-8500; innatwindmilllane.com

GARDEN OASIS
The Baker House 1650 suits all tastes in East Hampton.

And finally, here’s the past as heritage. Baker House is a 1650 home that in 1911 was transformed into an Elizabethan-style manor by that era’s Charles Gwathmey, Joseph Greenleaf Thorpe, the architect who did Grey Gardens among numerous other mansions, many in the gambrel style. Here, though, he went off on an inspired tangent, ransacking the Elizabethan playbook brilliantly: molded plaster ceiling paneling in the living room, coffered wood paneling in the lobby sitting room, tall eaves faced with strapwork (a decorative version of half-timbering), and those small-paned windows that give Elizabethan-style façades their inimitable rhythm.

I stayed in Maidstone, one of the top suites and a sonata of green. I’ve stayed in scores of luxury hotels around the world, but have rarely been so taken with a room. It’s not the largest or the most luxurious room that I’ve ever had, but it wraps you in a cashmere throw of the past—reproduction William Morris wallpaper of twirling tendrils, three-over-five small paned windows that look across to Mulford Farm, embracing armchairs, and a window seat long enough to stretch out on, which my companion promptly did, purring the afternoon away here with a book.

The garden feels like the English countryside: 200-year-old wisteria vines agony-twisted up to the crossbeams of an arbor, and cypress trees formed an honor guard down the far side of the property. Loungers were strewn about in front of the small pool, which has been beautifully worked into the landscape. Over the hedge, there’s an expanse of lawn with mature trees—hoop-skirted evergreens and obese rhododendrons ready to bloom—leading to the Carriage House, a two-suite compound with its own pool, much larger than the one behind the main house. (Baker House stands out among Hamptons luxury inns for having a pool at all, as it does for the small gem of a spa in the basement, which has its own pool, sauna, and jacuzzi.)

The room to get in the Carriage House is the Loft Suite, an open-plan garret of white, taupe, and beige with a big sleigh bed, a shower for two, and a deck flanked by gables. It’s $1,500 a night in season, and as you suspected, in season it’s always booked. However, I’d be quite happy waking up to see the hand-hewn wooden beams of The Hedges, one of the smallest rooms in the original part of the house. Past perfect. 181 Main St., East Hampton, 324-4081; bakerhouse1650.com