The authentic and timeless world of Ralph Lauren
April 2025
RL/Culture

When Small Was Big

An homage to the high style, low cost of the modernist beach shack.
By Paul Goldberger
My fantasy of a perfect summer has always been to drive out to my house in Amagansett every Monday in July and August and then drive back to New York every Friday. It never quite works out that way, so instead, when the village and the beach get to be too much, I go to Louse Point, a narrow spit of land between Gardiner’s Bay and the inlet known as Accabonac Harbor, where things are almost as they were when I first came to eastern Long Island more than four decades ago. Small children jump into the water or search for seashells on the beach, there are kayakers and paddleboarders gliding across the water, and even when it is busy it is startlingly quiet. And when I go to Louse Point, the thing that brings me the most joy isn’t the view across the water, but the view of the little house on stilts designed by an architect who is little remembered today, but whose work brings you back to the days before the Hamptons sold its soul to hedge fund guys who believe that no decent family of four should spend the summer in any house that doesn’t have 15,000 square feet, a 75-foot-long pool, and a tennis court.
ABOVE WATER
Top, Robert Rosenberg’s house on stilts, which sits on the edge of Louse Point; designed by Julian and Barbara Neski, Gorman House sits on the beach in Amagansett.
The architect’s name was Robert Rosenberg, and not a lot of his work is still around. But this house, not much more than a tiny box, is still very much as it was, more than 70 years after it went up in 1954. It has no pool, or garage, or spa, or much of anything except views of Accabonac Harbor in one direction, and of Gardiner’s Bay in the other. The interior is mostly open living space, elevated above the ground to improve the view, but also, I suspect, because its architect knew then what we are only discovering now in the age of climate change, which is that bays and inlets flood, and houses beside the water are safer if water can wash under them. The house is a modern cabin, sleek and funky at the same time, and you can tell that it was placed so its occupants could see in all directions. They can also be seen, and that, perhaps, is the thing I like best of all: In an age in which security seems to count for everything, and almost every beach house is hidden behind enormous hedges and electronically operated gates, this house is right there, for everyone to see. It is almost arrogant in its modesty, in its indifference to the pretension of privacy, like a guy who strides into a restaurant in his bathing suit because, well, that’s what you do at the beach, right? This house has nothing to hide.
Small children jump into the water or search for seashells on the beach, there are kayakers and paddleboarders gliding across the water, and even when it is busy it is startlingly quiet.
BEACH TOME
The book that tells the definitive story of Hamptons modernism is Alastair Gordon’s Weekend Utopia, which will be reissued in 2026.
There are those who are nostalgic for the farmstands of the Hamptons, and those who are nostalgic for soft ice cream at the Snowflake or the time when parking wasn’t harder in East Hampton than Manhattan. I miss so many other houses that had the spirit of the Louse Point cottage, of which there were once dozens upon dozens, like the house the French architect Pierre Chareau created for Robert Motherwell out of a Quonset hut. Some of my other favorites were the Pinwheel House by Peter Blake, so named because its exterior wall panels slid out to create a pinwheel, or the houses of architects like Andrew Geller and Julian and Barbara Neski, who built beach cottages around the Hamptons that were notable both for their crisp geometries and simple modesty. But almost all the modern houses in eastern Long Island in the decades following World War II were modest; that was the whole point. Charles Gwathmey’s famous house for his parents, which was built in 1965 and launched his career, cost all of $35,000. It was built to celebrate nature, and a life lived outdoors, and the summer. These places were pavilions, not manor houses, a rebuke to the grand, Shingle style manses of an earlier Hamptons generation, since by then, who really wanted those old barns anyway?
ANGLES OF REPOSE
From top left, Reese House by Andrew Geller and his Esquire Weekend House, an unbuilt proposal from 1958; architectural drawing of the Pinwheel House designed by Peter Blake; the artist Robert Motherwell in the house Pierre Chareau built out of a Quonset hut; Charles Gwathmey in front of the house he built for his parents in1965 for $35,000 in Amagansett.
From top, Reese House by Andrew Geller and his Esquire Weekend House, an unbuilt proposal from 1958; architectural drawing of the Pinwheel House designed by Peter Blake; the artist Robert Motherwell in the house Pierre Chareau built out of a Quonset hut; Charles Gwathmey in front of the house he built for his parents in1965 for $35,000 in Amagansett.
Well, as it turned out, a lot of people did, once they got rich, and that was sort of the problem, because so many of the gentle little modern boxes of the postwar years turned out to have been built on prime pieces of real estate, bought for a song 60 or 70 years ago, and it became a kind of thing in the Hamptons to buy one of those little pavilions and tear it down because it was the absolutely perfect place to put a McMansion. And so the Motherwell house went to make way for a kind of Adirondack cottage, along with many others, so that people could use their sites to put up enormous shingled villas with gambrel roofs and air conditioning and kitchens that could produce dinner for 200. The authentically modern gave way to the unauthentically old; such is the paradox of architecture in the Hamptons. There are still plenty of good little houses left from the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s, but they keep disappearing, and the ones in the fanciest addresses are the ones most in jeopardy. Lucky is the architect whose clients back then couldn’t afford prime real estate: his or her house may survive. Then again, there has been one truly happy story of late, and it involves an exquisite Miesian pavilion rendered in wood and glass in the fashionable East Hampton precinct of Georgica, designed in 1962 by Paul Lester Wiener for Robert and Ethel Scull. When it went on the market a few years ago, its fancy address made it a sure candidate for a tear-down. Then Lisa Perry, a designer, collector, and philanthropist, bought it, restored it, and turned it into Onna House, a gallery for women artists. It is a triumphant act of architectural rescue. But it took a lot of present-day Hamptons money to preserve the architectural modesty of the Hamptons we have lost.
PAUL GOLDBERGER is a Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic and the author of numerous books, including Why Architecture Matters and Ballpark: Baseball in the American City.
More from
article image
Culture
New York’s Grandest Saloon
For more than 100 years, the Oyster Bar Saloon in New York City has been a quiet refuge for some of America’s greatest writers, as well as the advertising men who were the original Mad Men. Isn’t it time you bent your elbow there?
Read
article image
Culture
The Most Stylish Sports Movie. Ever.
In The Thomas Crown Affair, Steve McQueen dresses to win.
Read
article image
Culture
Field of Dreams
A famous Slim Aarons photograph that says a lot more than what appears.
Read