Hamptons Architectural Styles

The New York assessment roll does not record architectural style in any useful way for the South Fork. Its style codes are broad form categories, and on the records the Research Desk has reviewed the field reads "Unknown." Style has to be read from the house and its documents: National Register nominations, Town designation guidelines and the Town of Southampton's 2014 historic resources survey. These guides explain how to recognize each style, where it concentrates, which documented examples to look at, and what renovation and historic review mean for it.

• Half-Houses and Saltboxes: the heavy-timber-frame houses of the late 1600s to early 1800s, and the East Hampton Village rule that reaches into the frame itself.
• Farmhouse Vernacular: nineteenth-century farm and village houses with Greek Revival and Victorian trim, plus their barns and potato barns.
• Shingle Style: the 1880s–1920s summer cottage, from the McKim, Mead & White houses at Montauk to East Hampton's Summer Colony.
• Colonial Revival: new houses and antiquarian remodels built on colonial models from about 1885 into the 1930s.
• Georgian Revival: the formal, symmetrical classical house, a small documented group led by Guild Hall.
• Postwar Modernism: the 1950s–1960s modern houses of Peter Blake, Andrew Geller, the Neskis and Charles Gwathmey, few of them protected.
• New Traditional: recent houses in historic dress, and the codes that push new construction toward shingle and gables.
• Contemporary Modern: current modern design that reworks local barns and shingles, and how far the review boards let it depart.