Ever wondered what’s actually behind those hedges out East? Inside the Hamptons, from author Jennifer Ash Rudick for Vendome Press, hands you the keys to 18 jaw-dropping residences—no NDA required.
Rudick, who calls Southampton home, crisscrossed the South Fork, starting near Quogue and wrapping up in Montauk, to track down the exact design vernacular that makes the East End so unique. There are no style restrictions here. Find weathered old barns-turned-artist-studios and shingled cottages alongside oceanfront estates and sleek glass-walled homes that look like they belong in a design magazine (because, frankly, some have already been scouted).
A few names will be familiar: Aerin Lauder opened up her Water Mill beach bungalow, a granddaughter’s homage to a family estate that traces back to Estée herself. Art collector Carolyn Brody and real estate power broker Mary Ann Tighe both let readers inside their abodes. Full-timers or seasonal escapees—all are welcome. George de Man’s Shelter Island Victorian empties out come winter when the ferry slows down, while Amanda Ross and Zack Bacon’s Shinnecock Hills cottage runs as a year-round family retreat.
Photographer Tria Giovan, based in Sag Harbor, is the reason these houses look this candid. This is her third book with Rudick, and the kind of access on display here—the sunrise light in a stairwell, the clutter left exactly where it fell on a reading nook table—doesn’t happen for just anyone.
Paul Goldberger writes the foreword, and he gets at something that pictures can’t quite say outright: This isn’t the Hamptons of gossip columns or old hats pretending nothing’s changed. Instead, it showcases spaces that allow its residents to be fully in the world or to retreat from it entirely—all under the same roof.
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