Harrie T. Lindeberg

Harrie T. Lindeberg's South Fork reputation rests largely on one house and one roof. Coxwould, built in 1912 on Lily Pond Lane in East Hampton Village, was named by the designer David Netto in a 2019 East Hampton Historical Society lecture as the house that best defines East Hampton's character. Its cedar-shingle roof sweeps down two and a half stories in a wavy line meant to recall English thatch. It is known locally as the Lindeberg roof.

Lindeberg, sometimes called "the American Lutyens," designed country houses across the country. His East End thread starts earlier, as a draftsman at McKim, Mead & White, where he assisted Stanford White on The Orchard in Southampton.

Who he was

Lindeberg (1879–1959) studied at the National Academy of Design, worked for McKim, Mead & White, and left in 1906 to practice with another of the firm's draftsmen, Lewis Colt Albro. The partnership of Albro & Lindeberg lasted until 1914; Lindeberg practiced alone afterward, with clients from Long Island's North Shore to Chicago and Houston. The standard reference is Mark Alan Hewitt's Domestic Architecture of H.T. Lindeberg (1996).

The East Hampton houses

Coxwould, Lily Pond Lane (1912). The lecture report describes the roof precisely: a continuous run of cedar shingles, broken by only a few dormers, descending to end over a low entry porch. A second Lindeberg house nearby uses a two-story sweeping roof flared at the eaves.

Lindeberg wrote against gables that break a roofline and against "unmeaning ornament or showy paint — all of which are a source of wasteful expense and depressing things to live with." He held that a country house should be two stories, a step above the lawn.

The influence

The same lecture traced the roof forward: to Grosvenor Atterbury's Woodin House on Lily Pond Lane, and to the architect Francis Fleetwood, for whom the sweeping roof became a signature in the 1980s. A sweeping shingle roof on a newer East Hampton house is therefore more likely to be a quotation than a Lindeberg.

What to look for

• One dominant roof, shingled to suggest thatch, carried low over the walls and entry.
• Few dormers and few gables; plain painted surfaces.
• Two stories, with the ground floor close to the level of lawn and garden.
• English-cottage sources more than the American Shingle Style, though the two meet in East Hampton.

Alteration and verification

A thatch-effect roof is a maintenance item: re-roofing in cedar to the original profile is skilled work, and a substitution can change the house's defining feature. Ask for the roofing history alongside the permit file.

Before relying on a Lindeberg credit, check the Hewitt monograph, which catalogs his commissions, and note that a house from 1906–1914 may be recorded under Albro & Lindeberg. Then match it to the East Hampton Village building department file and the Village's historic-district materials for the parcel.

Considering a Lindeberg house?

Request a property brief from The Roebling Research Desk that confirms the attribution against the monograph and the Village record, documents the roof and other original fabric, and sets out what Village review allows.