David Netto was ready to pitch the Hedges Inn’s new owner, Sarah Wetenhall, on his vision for the iconic East Hampton hotel’s redesign. But he needed one assurance from the proprietor: no suits.
“I would get these wonderful calls about hotels, and I wanted to do them,” he tells me. “But the minute that ended up in front of the suits, they would say, ‘Well, what other commercial projects has he done before?’” He could point to a starry list of residential clients: Jerry and Jessica Seinfeld, Lauren Santo Domingo, Breck Eisner. But Netto had zero hotels to his name.
So he asked the hotelier for a promise. “You can’t let me fall in love with this project and then take it away to a boardroom full of people that are not going to want to hire me,” Netto told her. Wetenhall had a simple response: “It’s just me. I’m the decider.”
Ultimately, Wetenhall decided on Netto, closing the property for renovations in mid-September, after operating it for one summer. “We knew we needed, basically, East Hampton’s son,” she said, referring to the salt-and-pepper-bearded decorator, “someone who was born and bred and knew and loved this place.”
It was a successful formula for Wetenhall in Palm Beach. Almost a decade earlier, she and her husband, Andrew, bought the barrier island’s Colony Hotel and tapped Celerie Kemble, a descendant of Palm Beach royalty, to fix up the pink and green jewel box. Netto couldn’t claim First Family of East Hampton status, but he did visit Hedges Inn as a kid who summered in the moneyed enclave.
Before blue checkmarks frequented the hotel, it was the home of John D. Hedges and his wife in the 19th century. Wetenhall directed Netto to tap into its legacy as a personal residence, working with him to dream up a character for the 12-room hotel. “We want it to feel like the house of, let’s just say, maybe one of East Hampton’s grande dames,” she tells me. “The woman behind this place has a very eclectic and well-traveled and mature sense of style and design.”
The designer took the brief and ran with it, studying some of the buzziest venues in New York and London, including the Polo Bar and 5 Hertford Street, and their chic, lived-in aesthetic. Netto lifted the London members’ club’s open seating culture for his lobby design, which includes a game table with backgammon by the entrance. “The most elegant and civilized, 18th-century thing about 5 Hertford Street is you just perch anywhere,” he says.
He also called out its proprietor Robin Birley’s personal touch, noting that the Brit “entirely curated every object chosen by hand, down to the postcards that are framed in the bathrooms.”
Some of the Hedges’s elements—like a weather vane and rowing oar on its walls—feel like they’ve been there since John D. Hedges’s days. But Netto plucked them from antique shows, adding to the fenced-in, white-clapboard property’s Yankee feel. “Let’s do an English country house–level of wit and joyful color and sort of cosmopolitan take on a little wooden house in East Hampton,” says Netto of his recipe.
The new Hedges comes amid a wave of recent high-end hotel openings in the Hamptons, including Hotel Corduroy in Montauk and Faraway Sag Harbor. “I’m very much against the push toward new, new, new,” says Netto. “That’s not why anybody would call me. I’m in love with history.”
He’s made an exception for some contemporary elements, including the bathrooms’ terrazzo floors. But the hotel is riddled with lively, Old World flair, like a painting of the largest shark ever identified, which he snagged at the Decorative Fair in London, and a floating bathtub in its third-floor studio suite. One of his favorite spaces is a coat-closet- sized library on the main floor with a fireplace, bookshelves, and windows.
With the Colony Hotel’s Swifty’s restaurant making the trek north, Netto said guests can enjoy drinks, including a Manhattan featuring socialite Julie Macklowe’s rye brand, while lounging on the library’s inviting chairs. “You can sort of slouch around and use body language and seduce somebody,” he says. “I think the Hedges is going to get a lot of people laid.”
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