Aymar Embury II

Aymar Embury II is best known for public works in New York City from the Robert Moses era. In East Hampton he designed Guild Hall, which opened on Main Street on August 19, 1931, and a house on Middle Lane the same year. From the 1930s he kept a residence in East Hampton.

His importance to a South Fork buyer is narrower than his New York fame. He was one of the country-house architects of the early twentieth century, and he wrote books on the subject. A documented Embury house in East Hampton is a period estate house by an author of the type.

Who he was

Embury (1880–1966) graduated from Princeton in civil engineering in 1900 and built a reputation around World War I designing country houses for the upper middle class. He published One Hundred Country Houses (1909) and The Dutch Colonial House (1913), among others. From the 1930s he was a senior architect on New York's parks program, with work ranging from the Central Park Zoo to the Triborough Bridge.

His second wife, the landscape designer Ruth Dean, laid out the walled garden at Grey Gardens — a house by Joseph Greenleaf Thorp.

The East Hampton work

Guild Hall, Main Street. A cultural center combining galleries and a theater, built on the former Samuel Miller homestead between the First Presbyterian Church and Mulford Farm in East Hampton Village. The theater is octagonal with a proscenium stage. The building was comprehensively renovated in a project completed in 2024.

32 Middle Lane (1931). An estate house that stayed with its original family from 1931 until a 2017 sale. It is the clearest residential Embury attribution in the press record.

What to look for

• The early-twentieth-century American country house Embury wrote about: Colonial Revival, Georgian Revival and Dutch Colonial sources, with symmetry and formal rooms.
• A long single-family tenure, as at Middle Lane, can mean more original fabric survives. It can also mean older systems; the permit file shows which.

How to verify an attribution

Use Embury's published books and archival papers, the Village or Town of East Hampton building department file for the parcel, and the East Hampton Historical Society. A house that has changed hands only once may have original drawings in private hands; ask for them.

Considering an Embury house?

Request a property brief from The Roebling Research Desk that confirms the attribution, separates the 1930s house from later work, and prices the systems a long-held house is likely to need.