Friday, October 26, 2012

Ross Bleckner Gives It Another Go in Sagaponack

SELLER: Ross Bleckner
LOCATION: Sagaponack, NY
PRICE: $15,000,000
SIZE: 4 acres, 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: It was just yesterday that Your Mama learned that a-list abstract expressionist artist Ross Bleckner had re-listed his bucolic and legendary compound in the Hamptons with a $15,000,000 price tag. We first heard word from our tireless and much-appreciated aide de camp Hot Chocolate but, before we could sing a single stanza of Yankee Doodle Dandy, those ever-industrious kids at Curbed had done chawed that bone.* C'est la vie in the increasingly crowded and cut-throat world of (celebrity) property gossip, right? Onward we push anyways. Okay?

Mister Bleckner's comely compound sits about equidistant between the swank, boutique-filled East Hampton and Southampton communities and spans about four, L-shaped acres located just a gloriously short stroll (or roll) to the sand in the bare-footed and beyond beautiful but ego-bruisingly expensive beach side enclave of Sagaponack.

The estate's main house was, quite famously, the long-time home of fey and fantastic and fantastically fey writer/social chronicler Truman Capote who owned the property for nearly 25 years before he went to meet his Great Editor in the Sky in 1984. Mister Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany's) is said to have put the finishing touches on his phenomenal, genre pioneering true crime novel In Cold Blood while living here. This property is, for many artists and writers, hallowed ground.

In 2002, Architectural Digest published a delightful collection photographs of the Mister Capote and his simple, contemporary, custom-built cottage. We imagine, natch, the interview and photos were done years earlier since, as just mentioned, Mister Capote, may he rest in peace, had met his maker 18 years earlier.

Anyhoo, Mister Capote bequeathed the property to his long-time man-friend companion, writer Jack Dunphy, who passed it to the Nature Conservancy upon his death in 1992. Mister Bleckner purchased it the following year for—we suggest the real estate weak-willed snatch up a nerve pill—$800,000. That's right, children: eight hundred thousand dollars. That is, of course, an unimaginable amount of money for minimum wage workers and middle class earners alike but—all things real estate being relative to their locations—it was a downright enviable and fractional pittance of its current value. Mister Bleckner certainly did his pocket book a favor when he put this piece of Hamptons heaven into his property portfolio, didn't he?

Current listing information shows the beach-close compound has four legal buildings with a total of four bedrooms and 4 bathrooms in about 3,500 square feet of interior living space.

As best as Your Mama can figure from a careful reading of current listing information, the recently expanded ocean view main house—approximately 2,000 square foot with a crisply rustic and warmly austere day-core—has two bedrooms and two bathrooms. A wee, achingly sweet cedar shingled guest cottage has two more bedrooms and one more bathroom and a detached, 1,900 square foot, clerestory windowed art studio claims, we unscientifically deduce, the fourth and final bathroom.

The compound's gorgeous grounds have that painstaking and perfectly un-fussed look that makes the Hamptons so damn dreamy. They are, people, they're dee-voon.  To be sure, the Hamptoons are hardly a douche bag free zone and the traffic alone can be enough to make you slit your wrists on a sunny Saturday in August. Plus—let's get real for a moment, shall we—it's downright preposterous that any person—no matter how rich or gauche—would ever pay $100 bucks for a single pound of unbelievably delicious lobster salad from that little gourmet shop in "downtown" Sagaponack. (All you Hamptonites know exactly where we mean.) But, children, as Your Mama lives, breathes and drinks gin and tonics like water, they are absolutely spectacular. They really are.

Anyhoo, towering hedges line the long driveway and curve and bend to define various outdoor "rooms." The "room" just behind the main house holds the rectangular swimming pool dropped effortlessly into a broad swathe of very green lawn. On the other side of the main house, the west side, another broad expanse of lawn unrolls towards the beach. At the far end an abrupt cut in the dense foliage marks the entrance to the long, curving outdoor hallway that connects main house to Mister Bleckner's art studio.

Imagine for a moment that this might be your commute to work, as it is for Mister Bleckner when he is in residence in Sagaponack. Gone are the blaring horns and all those hazardous moe-rons who are too cheap to buy themselves a goddamn Bluetooth device. In their place, lucky Mister Bleckner hears the sound of the distant surf and the rustle of the salty sea breeze as is skitters smoothly through the reeds. Maybe there are birds chirping and unseen swarms of crickets doing their high-pitched buzzing-thing too. There be birds chirping, right? Whatever there is, we'll take us an extra dollop of that daily during the summer, thank you very much.

This is not, as it turns out, Mister Bleckner's first time to ride this particular real estate merry-go-round. In 2008, he had the property listed at $14,600,000, almost ten percent less than its current price tag.

The Old-School Hamptons-lover that Your Mama is hopes the next owner will maintain the modesty of the property. However, without any special stipulations laid forth for the preservation of the property—which there may or may not be—the cynic in Your Mama thinks a hot-shot spec mansion builder could easily swoop in, buy it and bulldoze this beeotch to make way for a 20,000 square foot shingled "cottage" with a bowling alley in the basement and a $35,000,000 price tag.

Knock on wood, child.

*This is a recurrent theme today. We also first learned from Hot Chocolate that Susan Soros, the ex-wife of billionaire George Soros, put her New York City apartment on the market at $50 million before we figured out that the New York Times was already on that real estate nugget like white on rice.

listing photos: Sotheby's International Realty

18 comments:

Aunt Gina said...

Truman and his long time lover Jack Dunphy actually each had their own house. There is a famous photo of the two of them waving to each other from the second floor of their respective homes. The idea was that they loved each other, but could not live together. Jack was also a published writer, although not nearly on the stellar level as Truman. It is an exquisite property, but Truman would probably faint dead away if he saw it's current price tag.

Anonymous said...

I once had a house sheathed in redwood out in the country in Virginia. I had to battle carpenter bees that would bore holes in the wood to make their nests and mice that lived between the drywall inside and the redwood outside. The redwood would warp and had to be repaired. If I had dogs there would be no snakes around and therefore plenty of mice. If no dogs, then snakes and no mice. The tradeoffs were all unpleasant. I would not want a country house with redwood siding ever again.

Anonymous said...


This is truly the most exquisitely
beautiful home ever, ever, EVER
featured in the history of The Real Estalker blog.

It has an otherworldly grace.

Anonymous said...


Here's the thing....the paleness of all the colors, the stairway, the chairs, the way the light hits the space, the synergy, the flowers,
the meditative qualities, the "Mackintosh"-style windows, the strange sense that even though it's bare and minimal it's inviting and warm rather than cold and alienating, the garden, the color of the grass, the style of the fence, the color of the water in the pool, the lack of pretension(modernist or otherwise)yet the depth of soul that seems to spring from the corners, the way I seem to hear a little girl's laughter in the distance just by staring at the photos.....

Anonymous said...

I seem to remember reading that Truman and Jack willed the property to the Nature Conservancy not so much for the buildings [which have been significantly reworked] but for the land itself, as a means of preserving it's beauty for future generations. How is it that it could be sold off only a year later? Seems to fly in the face of their intentions? I guess once you're dead...

Anonymous said...

"The money realized by the Nature Conservancy from the sale of Capote and Dunphy’s Sagaponack estate was used to buy close to 20 crucial acres that linked preserved Greenbelt lands to the north and south. The Capote/Dunphy Preserve, as it is officially known."

Both Truman and Jack's ashes were scattered on Crooked Pond.

Apparently the Conservancy accepted the property with the agreement they would not hold it, but sell it for the purpose of acquiring the land now named for them.

Call me a cynic, but it is probably highly doubtful Mr. Bleckner will part with any of that 15 million for any similar endeavor....despite his over 14 million dollar profit on his original investment.

Anonymous said...

11:28..that is regretful if correct. It seems natural that Mr. Bleckner would also donate the property..perhaps as an artist school. He would still get a tax break. What goes around comes around..

Anonymous said...

an interesting aside: Truman's ashes were split between Joanne Carson, his close friend, and Jack Dunphy, This was Truman's wish so he could be forever bicoastal.... Jack's half was scattered as described above. Joanne's half were originally kept in her home, until they were stolen during a party. Eventually the urn was returned and Joanne then purchased a crypt for the ashes, close to Marilyn Monroe's, another close friend of Truman's. And just to stay somewhat on topic I would without any hesitation, sell my soul for this house.

Anonymous said...

Capote was arguably the most important writer of the twentieth century. One would think this property's provenance would rate some legal protections from the possibility of the tear down nightmare Mama describes.

Anonymous said...

I agree with 11:47, however the time for protection was before Bleckner purchased. He now owns the property, and is free to do with it what he likes. If he was inclined toward preservation, as opposed to greed, the property would not have been offered for sale.

Old Hag in a house said...
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Petra's said...

Mama, is that last paragraph a diss against the "Sandcastle" estate? Love it!

Elliott Broidy said...

It's very modern and chic.

Carla Ridge said...

I still treasure my copy of the 1976 issue of Architectural Digest that featured this house when Truman was in residence -- it's the first one I bought with my own money as a teenager.

I also treasure the memories of being asked to get him home one night from the bar called Rounds in NYC...it was a revolving responsibility among the habitues...i was hoping he'd ask me up so i could see his legendary UN Plaza apartment, but the tottering drunk just wandered off into the lobby, leaving this (then)poor party boy to pay for the cab, LOL. Well, at least i got a *little* story out of it.

Anonymous said...

Carla? You were a boy, then?