Couple Who Tore Down Beloved Hamptons Landmark Buys $21 Million New Build

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They buy a $21 million house as a temporary weekend place, while they continue to argue with the Southampton Village Board of Architectural Review & Historic Preservation about their plans to build a “grand house” on the site of the storied, historic mansion they tore down a couple years ago.

The very rich people in question are Jessie Ding, a vice president at Goldman Sachs, and Ning Jin, a chief investment officer at the Viking Global Investors hedge fund. They recently acquired a newly built home on Southampton’s tony Ox Pasture Lane for $21.4 million for use as for their part-time pad while they haggle with the powers that be and plan to build the weekend house of their dreams. They also own a full-floor apartment on New York’s Park Avenue, which they purchased in 2018 for $20 million, plus the now-deceased Southampton Art Deco landmark mansion known as Four Fountains, which they scooped up in late 2019 for $22 million and demolished just a week later.

Repped by Nest Seekers’ James Giugliano, the guy from Million Dollar Beach House, the couple’s freshly built “temporary” house is a lovely and amenity-filled, if somewhat generic, typical rich-person new construction filled with all the usual rich-person amenities. There’s 1.8 acres of land and a 15,352-square-foot mansion with 10 bedrooms and 14.5 bathrooms. Naturally there’s also a pool, sunken tennis court, gym with sauna, and a media room. (Keep in mind, the media room is separate from the 22-seat movie theater!)

The custom ebony library was staged for the selling process with more vases propped on books than actual books, and there are more beverage stations than Sally Housecoat of East Mud Puddle, Iowa, would ever believe: a coffee bar, a butler’s pantry and not one but two wet bars, as well as a “wine closet.” Bottoms up!

What the couple tore down was described in a former listing thus: “An heirloom American Art Deco majestic jewel estate [that] has reigned in Southampton for nearly a century. Built in 1928 for Lucian and Ethel Tyng by world-famous architects Peabody, Wilson & Brown….” Subsequent owners include architect Archibald Brown — the Brown in Peabody, Wilson & Brown, who loved the house so much he purchased it, as well as the late and fabled chief of CBS, William S. Paley. It was Paley who added the swimming pool, pool house, and reflecting pools. In the Sotheby’s auction of the Browns’ Four Fountains furnishings, legendary interior designer Albert Hadley wrote, “Four Fountains was a unique architectural example of American Art Deco Design.”