Grosvenor Atterbury

Grosvenor Atterbury designed the building on Jobs Lane that Samuel Longstreth Parrish commissioned in 1897 to house his collection, and a run of country houses in Southampton, Shinnecock Hills and East Hampton in the first decade of his career. The best-known is the Herter house on Georgica Pond, called Près Choisis by its first owners and later known as The Creeks.

Atterbury is better known nationally for Forest Hills Gardens in Queens and for a precast concrete panel system that anticipated European modern housing. On the South Fork he is a different architect: a member of the Southampton summer colony designing for his father's circle, in a manner his biographers describe as naturalistic cottages that blend with the landscape.

He died in Southampton in 1956. The standard reference is Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker's 2009 monograph, The Architecture of Grosvenor Atterbury.

Who he was

Atterbury was born in Detroit in 1869, studied at Yale and then architecture at Columbia, and worked in the office of McKim, Mead & White before practicing on his own. His father, Charles Atterbury, was involved in founding the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club and the Shinnecock Summer School of Art. According to Pennoyer and Walker, many early clients came through that network, and a successful East End house was a way to launch a New York career.

The documented South Fork work

The Parrish building, 25 Jobs Lane, Southampton Village (1897). Commissioned by Samuel Longstreth Parrish for his collection in Southampton Village. The Parrish Art Museum moved to Water Mill in 2012. The building remains the most visible Atterbury work on the South Fork and the easiest place to see his hand.

Près Choisis / The Creeks, Georgica Pond, East Hampton. Designed for the painters Albert and Adele Herter. East Hampton press describes it as a Mediterranean villa by Atterbury on an estate of nearly 58 acres at Georgica Pond. Its later history is the clearest South Fork example of why an architect's footprint and a parcel's legal footprint are different records. After a 2012 fire call, East Hampton Village found dozens of structures built or expanded without permits. A six-year Zoning Board of Appeals process ended in 2018 with some structures approved by variance, additions cut back, denitrifying septic systems required, a 150-foot wetlands buffer enforced and cleared areas replanted.

Southampton and Shinnecock Hills houses. The monograph and its 2009 press coverage name the Arthur Brigham Claflin house in Southampton, the Alfred H. Swayne and Dr. Albert Ely houses in Shinnecock Hills, and the Southampton Club. The authors note that some of the houses have been demolished.

East Hampton houses. The Dr. Clarence C. Rice house, and the Woodin House on Lily Pond Lane in East Hampton Village, cited in a 2019 East Hampton Historical Society lecture for its sweeping roofline.

The family estate. Atterbury's own family estate in Southampton lost its original residence to fire in the 1920s; a 1973 modern house by Harry Bates now stands on part of the land on Eastway Drive. See Bates Masi + Architects.

What to look for

• Houses that sit low and read as cottages even when large, with roofs carried down close to the ground and walls that relate to planting and grade.
• Material experiment. Atterbury worked with concrete early — at Forest Hills as a panel system, and in stucco-finished construction on the East End.
• The plan as a sequence of rooms opening to garden and view, typical of the Shingle Style summer house he trained among, and in some commissions a more formal Colonial Revival or Mediterranean vocabulary.

Alteration and demolition

The monograph's own caveat applies: not every Atterbury house stands. Those that do have typically been enlarged, winterized and re-landscaped. On large estates, later accessory structures may have been built with or without approvals; at The Creeks, the Village's review took six years to resolve exactly that. A buyer should separate three layers: Atterbury's original building, later additions, and anything still lacking a permit or certificate.

How to verify an attribution

Begin with the Pennoyer and Walker monograph, which catalogs commissions. Match the house to the parcel through the Suffolk County tax map and the village or town building department file — original permits where they exist, certificates of occupancy, filed plans and later alteration permits. In Southampton Village and East Hampton Village, check whether the property sits in a local historic district, which brings review of exterior changes and demolition. Atterbury's name on a listing without a catalog entry or document behind it is a claim, not an attribution.

Considering an Atterbury property?

Request a property brief from The Roebling Research Desk that ties the house to the monograph and the municipal file, separates the original building from later work, and confirms the legal status of every structure on the parcel before value is assigned to the name.