Azurest, Sag Harbor Hills and Ninevah Beach

Azurest, Sag Harbor Hills and Ninevah Beach are three bayfront neighborhoods on the east side of the Village of Sag Harbor, and since December 2022 one Village zoning overlay governs them. Its main rule: no house may exceed 4,000 square feet of gross floor area, however large the lot, and combining lots does not raise the cap.

An overlay district is a layer of zoning placed over a mapped area to add or change rules there. This one applies the use and dimensional rules of the Village's R-20 one-family residence district, then adds a hard ceiling on house size and a few site rules.

This page is about those rules: what the code covers, where its boundary runs, what it allows and how it came to be adopted.

What the code is

The district is Article VIIIB of the Village Zoning Code (Chapter 300, §§ 300-8.14 to 300-8.16), added December 13, 2022 by Local Law No. 19-2022. The code calls it the HBBC Overlay District and spells the acronym out once as Historically Black Beachfront Communities. Its area is the same as the Sag Harbor Hills, Azurest, and Ninevah Beach Subdivisions Historic District, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 10, 2019.

The two designations are separate instruments. The building limits on this page come from the overlay, which is Village zoning. The code also says expressly that the overlay area is not being added to the Sag Harbor Village Historic District, so the Village's local historic-district review does not apply here through the overlay.

The boundary

The code draws the district around the outer edges of four subdivisions filed with Suffolk County in phases beginning in the 1940s: Azurest, Sag Harbor Beach Club, Sag Harbor Hills and Ninevah Beach. Sag Harbor Beach Club and Sag Harbor Hills later merged under the Sag Harbor Hills name. The code gives about 154 acres and these limits:

• North: Sag Harbor Bay.
• South: Hempstead Street and Hampton Street.
• West: the lines of houses along Richards, Milton and Cuffee Drives.
• East: State-owned woods along Little Northwest and Rattlesnake Creeks.

The code also lists the streets of each subdivision. Each is laid out on long north-south roads between Hempstead Street and the beach:

A parcel on one of the edge streets should be checked on the Village zoning map.

The house-size cap

In R-20, the Village caps a one-family house's gross floor area (the total counted floor space, measured under the code's definition) on a sliding scale tied to lot size:

The overlay keeps that scale but adds a ceiling: gross floor area "shall in no case exceed 4,000 regardless of the size of the lot," and the 4,000-square-foot limit "shall also apply to lots that have merged with neighboring lots."

In practice:

• Below 25,000 square feet of lot area, the ordinary R-20 scale already produces less than 4,000 square feet, so it still controls. A larger lot still allows a somewhat larger house, up to the cap.
• At 25,000 square feet and above, the overlay cap takes over. Elsewhere in R-20 the allowance keeps growing to 7,000 square feet. Here it stops at 4,000.
• Combining lots does not reset the cap. Buying the lot next door and merging it may add yard, privacy or room for accessory structures, but the house on the combined lot is still capped at 4,000 square feet.
• More than one dwelling on a lot counts together under the R-20 rule.

The R-20 lot-coverage limits also apply, and where the floor-area rule and the coverage rule differ, the more restrictive governs.

Other rules in the overlay

• Uses. Uses are those allowed in R-20, except that none of the code's special exception uses (uses allowed only with a separate approval) are permitted in the overlay.
• Dimensions. Setbacks, height and other dimensional rules follow R-20 except as the overlay provides.
• Accessory buildings. No more than three accessory buildings or structures per property. The general R-20 rules also apply: no accessory building over 600 square feet of gross floor area except an approved accessory apartment, no plumbing in accessory buildings except approved apartments and pool houses of 200 square feet or less, and no basements except storage or utility cellars in garages and approved apartments.
• Driveways. Impervious driveways (a surface water cannot pass through) are prohibited.
• Roads. District roads may not be improved with sidewalks.
• Enforcement. Photo or video evidence of a violation is enough for the Village to open an investigation.

How the designation was adopted

The listing came first. The four subdivisions were entered on the State and National Registers in 2019. In 2022 the Village Board considered two ways to regulate the area: adding it to the Village's local historic district, where exterior work goes before the Village's historic-preservation and architectural-review board, or creating a zoning overlay with size and site limits and no such review. The property owners' associations of the three neighborhoods backed the overlay. A separate request to add the area to the historic district was also before the Board.

After hearings in the fall of 2022, the Board adopted the overlay unanimously on December 13, 2022. The mayor said the Board would later take up whether some properties should be added to the Village's inventory of contributing historic structures. Searches through November 2026 found no later amendment to the overlay and no vote adding the area to the local historic district. At the November 2022 hearing, one speaker noted that an overlay is zoning code that a future Board can change more easily than a historic designation. A buyer should read the current code text rather than rely on any summary, including this one.

What it means for a purchase

• Value the lot against a 4,000-square-foot house, or less on lots under 25,000 square feet. A lot here does not carry the floor area the same lot would carry elsewhere in R-20.
• An existing house near the cap has little room to grow. Ask the architect for the current gross floor area under the code's definition before pricing an addition.
• Assembling lots buys land, not house size.
• Site work has limits a buyer may not expect: no paved driveway, no more than three accessory structures, no sidewalk.
• Beach access is a separate question. The code describes the subdivisions as planned around the bay beach, but what a particular deed conveys is in the deed, the filed map and any association documents. The Sag Harbor page covers the Village's other waterfront and flood questions.

Related pages

Sag Harbor covers the Village as a whole. The Sag Harbor Village Historic District is the separate locally regulated district to the west. The renovating and rebuilding guide covers floor-area and permit questions across the Hamptons.