McKim, Mead & White

McKim, Mead & White's South Fork record is short and unusually well documented. Seven cottages at Montauk built between 1882 and 1884, a painter's homestead in Shinnecock Hills in 1892, the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club clubhouse the same year, and The Orchard on Hill Street in Southampton Village, worked on from 1897 to 1906. Each is on the National Register of Historic Places, and the Montauk group is also a Town of East Hampton historic district with its own written guidelines.

That paper trail matters more than the name. The firm's reputation is national, and a name that large invites loose attribution. On the South Fork, the attributions a buyer can rely on are the ones in a nomination, a designation report or a municipal preservation record.

The record also shows two different modes. At Montauk the firm designed small, informal summer houses as a group. At The Orchard it added to and enlarged an existing house over nearly a decade for one client. A property connected to the firm should be read as one or the other.

Who they were

McKim, Mead & White was the New York partnership of Charles Follen McKim, William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White; the Village of East Hampton's historic-services narrative calls it the leading American firm at the turn of the twentieth century. The Town of East Hampton's guidelines place the Montauk houses in the early 1880s, when the firm's work was helping to define what is now called the Shingle Style — the late-nineteenth-century American summer house with wood-shingled walls, broad porches and roofs that pull the house down toward the ground.

Stanford White is the partner most often named in the Southampton and Shinnecock commissions. The Shinnecock clubhouse is credited to him. The Orchard was built for his friend James L. Breese, and its music room is believed to be White's last completed project. For the Chase Homestead, sources disagree on whether White personally drew it; the National Register credits the firm.

Several later East End architects passed through the office. Grosvenor Atterbury worked there before designing his own Southampton and Shinnecock Hills houses.

The Montauk Association: seven houses as one design

The Montauk Association was formed in 1881 as a private summer retreat on open pasture east of Ditch Plains. Frederick Law Olmsted drew the site plan; McKim, Mead & White designed the houses and a clubhouse on the sites he fixed along a ridge north of DeForest Road. The seven cottages, built 1882–84, are the Agnew, Benson, Sanger, Hoyt, Andrews, de Forest and Orr houses. The district was listed on the National Register in 1976.

The Town of East Hampton's guidelines (Local Law 30 of 2004) describe the group's value in one line: the houses and landscape are bound together as one creative work. They also record the alteration history a buyer needs. The clubhouse burned in 1933, and a 1962 house now stands about ten feet south of its foundation. The Orr House burned in 1997 and was reconstructed in 2000 from documentary and physical evidence; the Town treats the reconstruction as historic. Only the Agnew House retains its original shingles.

The rules that follow from this are specific. No additions to the south, east or west walls of the seven houses; modest additions are allowed on the north wall, using the original service wings as the model. New houses in the district are held to the range of the originals — 2,000 to 5,000 square feet across two floors — and are sited against Olmsted's 1881 plan. Fences, berms, regrading, tennis courts and paved driveways are restricted. A demolition application needs an engineer's or architect's report and approved replacement plans. See the Montauk Association Historic District, and Ditch Plains and Montauk for the surrounding market.

Shinnecock Hills and Southampton

The William Merritt Chase Homestead on Canoe Place Road in Shinnecock Hills was built in 1892 as the painter's house and studio. The National Register nomination describes a two-and-a-half-story shingled frame house with a gambrel roof — a roof with two slopes on each side, the lower one steeper. It also dates the changes: eyebrow windows added in 1917 and a rear laundry, porch and bathroom in 1920.

The Shinnecock Hills Golf Club clubhouse, credited to Stanford White, opened in 1892 and is often cited as the first purpose-built golf clubhouse in the country. The club property was listed on the National Register in 2000.

The Orchard, at 155 Hill Street in Southampton Village, shows the firm's later Colonial Revival manner: white-painted shingles and a two-story portico modeled on Mount Vernon's. It was designed between 1897 and 1906 and incorporated an 1858 house already on the site. It was listed on the National Register in 1980 and sits within the Southampton Village Historic District. The main house and its garden core survive, but the grounds around the axial garden now carry 29 condominium dwellings in six clusters, known as Whitefield. A buyer there is acquiring a unit within a landmark setting, governed by condominium documents, not the estate itself.

East Hampton: a remodeling

In East Hampton Village, the Village's Director of Historic Services credits the firm with an 1895 remodeling, not a new house: the 1874 Satterthwaite villa on Ocean Avenue, reworked as a Colonial Revival house with painted clapboard and classical details. It is a reminder that "designed by McKim, Mead & White" can mean a renovation of someone else's building.

What to look for

• The Montauk mode: modest scale, gable roofs, clapboard first stories under shingled upper walls, varied shingle patterns, broad porches, wide Dutch entry doors, distinctive chimneys and a house turned toward the ocean and its neighbors rather than the road. This is early Shingle Style at summer-cottage size.
• The Southampton mode: symmetrical Colonial Revival massing, porticoes and formal rooms added onto or around older fabric.
• Integrity: the Town's Montauk guidelines list which shingles, sash, porches and chimneys are original. Replacement materials matched to the originals are common; original material is the scarce part.

How to verify an attribution

Start with the National Register nomination for the property or district; the National Archives holds the Montauk Association (1976), Chase Homestead (1983) and Breese House (1980) nominations. For the Montauk houses, read the Town of East Hampton's designation report and guidelines, which name each house by address. Then pull the building department file — permits, certificates of occupancy and filed plans — to separate the original house from later additions, the 1920s-era changes recorded in nominations, and modern reconstruction. A shingled house near one of these sites is not a McKim, Mead & White house without a document saying so.

Considering a McKim, Mead & White property?

Request a property brief from The Roebling Research Desk that matches the house to its nomination and municipal record, separates original fabric from additions and reconstruction, and sets out what the applicable historic-district rules allow before any renovation is priced.