Art Village is a very special little neighborhood in the Hamptons community of Southampton, New York. Its narrow lanes and small, quaint cottages mean it frequently gets referred to as a toy village. Yet this tiny area has had a huge effect on American art and architecture, with ramifications that can still be felt more than a hundred years later.
So how did this toy village come to be? In 1891, the Shinnecock Summer School of Art, the first out-of-doors art school in the United States, opened to allow students from all over the country to study plein air painting under the tutelage of artist William Merritt Chase. The 100 to 150 students per summer either boarded with fishermen or farmers, roomed at local boardinghouses, stayed at the Art Club, which accommodated 30 women (and their chaperones), or shacked up in one of the dozen cottages in the Art Village compound. There was also also a larger house designed by McKim, Mead & White built for Chase and his family, which still exists, plus a thatched-roof windmill for pumping water, which no longer exists.
The art school was around for only about ten years, between 1891 and 1902, at which point Chase decided to return to summering in Europe. However, Chase painted some of his most notable American Impressionist landscapes in the Hamptons, and it wasn’t long before other schools popped up that were based on the Shinnecock model, including in California, where the Carmel School of Art hired Chase as headmaster in 1914.
The Chase Homestead at Shinnecock, William Merritt Chase, 1893
With three separate entrances, the 2.88-acre Art Village property on offer is unique in that it comprises a spacious main house plus three historic cottages and several additional outbuildings. Asking $9.995 million, the listing is shared by Hedgerow Exclusive Properties and Steve Gold at Corcoran.
Of the 19th-century cottages that comprise the compound, no two are like, but they all feature unpainted shingles, rustic stone chimneys, turreted bays, subsumed porches, and low, sheltering rooflines punctuated by dormers. Antoinette de Forest Parsons, in the June 27, 1895, issue of the St. Paul Dispatch, described the cottages: “The outer walls, washed by rains, and polished by the sun, shine like satin. Inside the cottages are finished in wood of a dark tone, and red curtains in the diamond-paned windows, or swaying festoons of vines that clamber up to the roofs against the gray walls make almost the only spots of bright color.”
Today the cottages are a bit more deluxe than rustic, and there’s not a red curtain to be found. They have not, however, lost one iota of their bohemian charm.
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Image Credit: Hedgerow Exclusive Properties The main house is known as Stepping Stones. With its gambrel roof, gabled dormers, porches, and bay windows, it closely hews to the character of an unpretentious late-19th-century artistic home, as well as regional vernacular buildings.
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Image Credit: Hedgerow Exclusive Properties The home’s three stories contain eight bedrooms and six bathrooms, as well as front and back staircases, two sunrooms, fir floors and brick fireplaces. The lower level is also windowed and finished for extra living space.
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Image Credit: Hedgerow Exclusive Properties A large sunroom is the perfect spot from which to view the verdant grounds, while the farmhouse-style kitchen sports vintage-style cabinetry, butcherblock countertops, and up-to-date appliances.
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Image Credit: Hedgerow Exclusive Properties -
Image Credit: Hedgerow Exclusive Properties -
Image Credit: Hedgerow Exclusive Properties A 900-square-foot brick terrace outside the main house is perfect for gazing out the historic gardens that are filled with beech, evergreens, crape myrtles, maple trees, hydrangeas, wisteria, lilacs, and roses. There is also a formal parterre and an allée of trees, together with original brick stairs, stone walls, and a fountain.
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Image Credit: Hedgerow Exclusive Properties In addition to the main house and three charming cottages, there is a detached garage and a ballroom, for a total of six buildings. Wait. A ballroom? That’s right, ballroom.
Built in 1901 by Hamptons starchitect Grosvenor Atterbury, the standalone ballroom (above) retains many of its original features, such as an elegant fireplace, large windows and a very high ceiling that’s somewhat unusually painted the blue color of a swimming pool.
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Image Credit: Hedgerow Exclusive Properties Tuck Cottage, with one bedroom and one bathroom (pictured above), is recently restored and boasts its own gated driveway, which gives it extra privacy, while the tiny one-bed/one-bath Garden Cottage sits close to the main house and would make an ideal art studio or pool house, though there is currently no pool on the property.
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Image Credit: Hedgerow Exclusive Properties Finally, there’s Laffalot (above and below), a two-story cottage built in 1891 by Katherine Budd, one of America’s first female architects. It too has been restored recently, and its history is among the most interesting in the whole village.
Laffalot originally had been built across the street from this property. It sold for $600,000 in 2013; unfortunately, in 2016, the Southampton Landmarks & Historic District Board received a demolition application, which they could not forbid. Fortunately, the owner of this property arranged to have Laffalot moved to her own land and saved the house.
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Image Credit: Hedgerow Exclusive Properties In 1896, Laffalot was purchased by artist Rosella “Zella” de Milhau. A friend of the irrepressible Zella once said, “[She] came to Shinnecock to be with friends and to make life merry for others in her own absurd and lovable way …” Zella was extraordinary to look at, too, preferring short hair and wearing plus-fours. She shared Laffalot with Molly Lawton, with whom she also lived during the winters in Brooklyn Heights. (Are you thinking what we’re thinking?)
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Image Credit: Hedgerow Exclusive Properties Laffalot was greatly admired, and Southampton magazine, in its Autumn 1912 issue, wrote, “This bare little hut under her magic ownership has grown from time to time by repeated accretions, like the native rambling vines on the neighboring hillsides, until the resultant structure is one of the most picturesque and pleasing hereabout and is as integral a part of the landscape as the brambles, bayberry bushes and furze of the fields beyond.”
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Image Credit: Hedgerow Exclusive Properties The magazine complimented Zella’s eclectic décor. “The ample fireplace, built of Southampton brick, is furnished with ancestral brass andirons and fender and over the mantel is an ancient stone panel from Mesopotamia representing a Syrian lion in half repose.” (The no-doubt quite valuable panel is no longer there, as can be seen in the photo of the living room.)
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Image Credit: Hedgerow Exclusive Properties During World War I, Zella successfully raised the money for an ambulance that she shipped to France and then drove herself. The Southampton Press printed a letter from her during the war in which she described her service “evacuating ‘old uns’ under shell fire and carrying wounded, too, under the same conditions.” For this, the French awarded her the Croix de Guerre.
The 1912 article ended “Long live Laffalot!” And it has, and will. The fabulous Zella, we think, would approve.
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Image Credit: Hedgerow Exclusive Properties -
Image Credit: Hedgerow Exclusive Properties