This $6 Million Hamptons Property Combines a Quaint Cottage With a Modern Manse
In 2013, East Hampton Village in New York passed a law that protects the area’s many historic timber-frame houses and encourages—and incentivizes—restoration of these buildings. While two homes on a small parcel is prohibited in East Hampton, if a site is home to one of two dozen designated landmarks built between 1700 and 1850, the owner can choose to preserve the original house and also build a second house there, making these properties an exception to the mandate. Now, the law grants these homes landmark status and protects them from demolition. That is exactly the case with the historic Hiram Sanford House on Egypt Lane, a Cape Cod-style dwelling built in 1740.
The man who ran the Pantigo Windmill once called the centuries-old, petite, timber-frame Hiram Sanford House home, and the site has been passed down for generations. It was dilapidated and in desperate need of repair. The home was bought by a former entertainment executive in 2017, who decided to renovate the Hiram Sanford House and build a new structure. The owner tapped New York-based firm Ammor Architecture, who he has worked with since 2008, including on the Abernathy Residence in Palm Springs. The home was recently listed for a smidge under $6 million by Saunders, making it an exceptionally rare opportunity to own both a piece of history and an incredible modern home.
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The half-acre property features the one-bedroom historic home, which has been preserved with original period details like a Rumford cooking fireplace, exposed beams, wide-plank hardwood floors, and windows. Now, it acts as an accessory property to the newly constructed modern home, completed in 2024, built from eight, modified shipping containers. It has three bedrooms, three full bathrooms, and one half bathroom split over two levels, with a rooftop lounge and infinity-edge pool and spa. The stark contrast of the old versus new was by design, and the property, nicknamed A Tale of Two Houses, even won a 2024 Merit Award from the AIA Brooklyn.
“The owner wanted to build something that created a conversation with the historic house,” Thomas Morbitzer, a partner at Ammor Architecture, tells Robb Report. “At the time, the historic house was built in the most efficient way they could build houses back then. We wanted to figure out what an efficient method of building a house today was, so we chose modified shipping containers as a method of prefabrication and created something unique.”
Morbitzer and his co-partner at Ammor, Goil Amornvivat, wanted the new house to almost frame the historic house. To do this, they created a long glass pavilion that houses the kitchen and dining room. It’s lined with windows and perfectly overlooks the pool, garden, pond, and lawn. Other prefabricated components in the house include a staircase that came from Belgium and the kitchen, in an effort to stick with that idea from the outside to the interiors.
“We describe it as a purposeful contrast, because there are a lot of different shingle-style houses in East Hampton, but the area also has a very unique modern house legacy,” he says. “This is a conversation about the town and the neighborhood in one site.”
The newer house has a modern design with glass and steel, but it also offers up warm interiors with wood paneling and types of wood accents. The rooftop is lined with tall grass to stay consistent with the ecology of the Hamptons’ landscape, a feature that acts as a nature cocoon when you’re up there enjoying an alfresco meal or sunbathing. As for the Hiram Sanford House, the interiors include exposed wood beams from the original house, gunstock posts that were buried in drywall and excavated during the restoration, and even original floors on the upper level. Ammor tried to recreate the wide-plank floors on the second level on the main level to make it feel like they, too, had been there for a long time. Prior to the restoration, the home looked like what they referred to as a “dilapidated doll house” with clunky 20th-century design (think: red shag carpet and lavender-hued walls) and old mechanics.
“Working on the home was definitely a puzzle,” Morbitzer says. “What was really fun about this one, particularly because this was a home restoration, as small as it was, the detailing was very intense. I feel like we really brought it back to something peaceful and calm and almost like we hadn’t been there, but there was quite a bit of effort to do that. It lives very modern for being so historic.”
Click here for more photos of the Hiram Stanford House.
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