New Traditional

Many new South Fork houses are built to look old: cedar-shingle walls, gable and gambrel roofs, wide porches, white trim, divided-light windows, sometimes a columned portico. The Research Desk calls this New Traditional. It is not a term from any designation document, but it names a real category: new houses dressed in the region's historic styles. Telling one from an original is often the most valuable thing a buyer can learn about a "shingle house."

The look is partly taste and partly regulation. Several South Fork codes push new construction toward traditional forms and materials.

How to recognize it

The vocabulary is borrowed from the Shingle Style, Colonial Revival and Georgian Revival. The giveaways are in scale, construction and site:

• Size and massing. Often larger than the historic houses they imitate. The Town of East Hampton's Montauk Association guidelines give a useful benchmark: the seven 1880s originals range from about 2,000 to 5,000 square feet across two floors.
• Symmetry and repetition. Long facades with repeated gables or dormers, and wings joined by connectors (hyphens) to break up a large plan.
• Materials. Even, coursed white cedar shingle with painted trim. Originals are not always easy to tell apart on this point: the Montauk guidelines note that only one of the seven 1880s houses there keeps its original shingles, and the rest carry matched replacements.
• Windows. Larger glass areas on rear and side elevations. Even the historic-district guidelines expect more glass there than on the front.
• Site. Pool, pool house, guesthouse and garage designed as a matched set. A 2011 Southampton house documented by Fairfax & Sammons, a "seven-bay Georgian shingle house" with hyphens, wings and a double-height Ionic portico, is an example. The firm's portfolio says the pool house, guesthouse and garage carry the same columns, cedar shingles and quoins.

The habit is not new. Between 1910 and 1915, Mary Talmage built rental cottages on Jones Road in East Hampton Village modeled closely on local saltboxes and center-hall houses. Those cottages are now themselves part of a National Register district.

Where the codes push toward it

• Town of East Hampton. Where the Architectural Review Board has jurisdiction (site-plan projects, the Agricultural Overlay District, landmarks and historic districts), the code tells it to encourage "traditional architectural treatments such as gabled roofs and the use of cedar shingles or other natural wood siding." The same section says the board must not use review to prohibit or unduly restrict other building types.
• Montauk Association Historic District. New houses are to be sited according to the 1881 Olmsted plan where possible, fit within the size range of the historic houses, and use wood-shingled gable roofs and shingle and clapboard walls. The board requires height poles on site before it decides. The guidelines cite a 1985 house in the district as an example that fits well.
• Bluff Road and Amagansett historic districts. The Bluff Road guidelines specify front setbacks matching the neighbors, gable, gambrel or hip roofs with cross gables, wood shingle and painted trim, vertical windows, and a porch. The Amagansett guidelines call for simple forms, unbroken gable roofs and shingle or clapboard.
• Village of East Hampton. In the four village historic districts, new construction must be compatible with the existing buildings in facade proportion, window arrangement, roof slope and spacing.
• Village of Southampton. The Board of Architectural Review and Historic Preservation requires new construction in the districts to be compatible with contributing properties. It discourages upper-story decks that overlook neighbors and gives particular attention to historic trees and screening.
• Village of Sag Harbor. The Board of Historic Preservation and Architectural Review can reject a design for "excessive similarity" or "excessive dissimilarity." That includes mass and scale that are out of keeping with the village even when the house meets the dimensional zoning table.

What this means for renovation and resale

A New Traditional house is not historic, so outside a district its renovation is ordinary building-permit work. Inside a district it is usually classed as non-historic or non-contributing. The boards still review exterior changes for their effect on the historic houses around it. The Bluff Road and Amagansett guidelines allow an addition to a non-historic house to follow that house's own style.

For pricing, a well-built new shingle house and a restored 1890s cottage are different products. The original carries review obligations and scarcity. The new house carries modern systems and no frame to preserve. Comparables should separate them.

What the assessment roll does not tell you

The roll does not separate a 2005 shingle house from an 1895 one by style. New York's codes offer broad form categories (Colonial, Contemporary, Mansion and others), and on the South Fork records the Research Desk has reviewed the style field reads "Unknown."

Year built is the field most likely to mislead with this style. An old house rebuilt to the frame, or demolished and replaced in the same dress, can carry either date. The State manual keeps actual year built, effective year built and year remodeled separately. The building permit and certificate-of-occupancy file show whether a house is a renovation or a replacement.

Related: Contemporary Modern, Renovating and rebuilding, all style guides.